All Your Dirty Secrets Have Come Undone
by La Guera
Summary: Every priest has a name, though few people are privy to it. Even Black Hat had a name before he was lost to the sands of Sola Mira. In his depthless hatred, Priest does not remember it, but someone else does, and some bonds cannot be broken.
1. Shadows Stretch Long

It's the little things that catch her unawares. She has long since grown accustomed to the silence left in Johannes' absence, the dull, dead emptiness where he used to be. She no longer listens for his footfalls on the stone floor of a catacombs gone to the vampires and the nightcrawlers and their servile pets or on a rough outcropping of rock above a suspected den. She no longer hears his voice in her ear as they sit to dinner, low and warm and asking her to pass the mash or the loaf of stale hardtack, nor does she feel him as she sleeps, a heavy, comforting warmth at her back, woolen cassock and warm breath and the drowsy press of his half-hard prick against the swell of her ass. Gone is gone, and in her heart, she knows that he is forever beyond her reach.

But it's an uneasy peace she has made with his loss, and sometimes as she threads her way through the throngs with her head bowed and her rosary twined between her fingers, she sees him in the high jut of passing cheekbones or the curve a shoulder. Sometimes she hears him in a snatch of conversation tossed to the winds, clipped and rough and full of secret mischief and humor black and tart as chicory. She knows it's not him, iknows, and yet she falters all the same, stops and sways and clutches the beads of the rosary so tightly that they rattle in her grip. She looks for him even though she knows she won't find him, scans the crowd until her eyes burn and her head throbs with the effort, and when she finds nothing but a sea of wary, unfamiliar faces, she drops her head and spits her bitter disappointment onto the gritty asphalt and plods on. The sea of indistinct bodies parts before her, fish shying from the shadow of a shark, and she soldiers on, head bowed and palm bruised by the press of the beads, the smarting stigmata of thwarted hope.

It's cheekbones this time, high and sharp, and her fingers spasm convulsively around the beads as she lurches to a stop and spins on her heel to track the flash of movement. A muffled curse at her back, and then a man trudges past. He's wiry and sallow and stooped, with sunken eyes and teeth gone dark with rot. His lips twitch with the impulse to repeat his dour implication, but then his eyes catch sight of the cross etched into the pale, thin flesh of her face, and the oath dies in his scrawny throat.

"Apologies, priest," he mutters, and scuttles away before she can reply.

_It wasn't him. You know it wasn't him,_ she chastises herself even as her eyes scan the crowd in search of a familiar flash. There, near the mouth of a squalid alleyway. Brown hair and a flash of high, regal cheekbones. But the man who bears them is too short and too paunchy and too bowlegged, and the flicker of hope gutters and dies inside her chest like all the others. The taste of greenbark and pitch fills her mouth, and she turns her head and spits a foaming clot onto the pavement.

_It wasn't him,_ she thinks, and resumes her trek.

_It never is, and it never will be_, says a gentle voice inside her head, the soft patient murmur of her childhood confessor, an Irishman with powdery hands and a shock of white hair to match his cleric's collar. _You know that, child._

Yes, she does know that, has known it since Priest and the battered remnants of his cohort had staggered back to the encampment with blood on their clothes and several holes in their already-dwindling ranks. Priest was hard and remote as the moon, but he was neither cruel nor a liar, and so when he had announced that Johannes and two others had fallen to the vampires in the hive at Sola Mira, she had known it for truth. The last of Johannes had been mixed with the blood and the dirt on Priest's face and hands, and it had sloughed off with every desultory, leaden mile they had walked beneath the pitiless sun.

_Gone, gone gone,_ her footsteps had chanted as they had straggled over the sand and grit and parched desert hardpan, and the listless snap of her cassock had echoed it, intimate as breath against her ear. _Gone, gone, gone._

She had not wept then. Such displays of emotion were prohibited by The Church, as forbidden to members of the Priesthood as sex and liquor and a life beyond the strangling strictures of the cloth. She had pressed her lips together until sensation had bled from them and taken shallow breaths against the unseen hand that had coiled its crushing fingers around her chest. Chin, another priest who had come to his majority along with her, had tried to offer what comfort he could with a pat on the back and the periodic jostle of his shoulder against hers as they walked, but it had only served to sharpen the yawning absence of a body on the other side of her, and she had coughed and hitched and spit her bitterness to the earth. Then she had fallen to the back of the line and let her eyes burn with tears she could not shed. She had been tempted to slow until they left her behind, but she had still feared death and damnation then, and she had known that Priest and the others would not abide another loss, would drag her back to the city by force if need be, and so she had walked blindly on, guided by the black of Chin's cassock and the snap of it around his slender ankles in the torpid, early-morning breeze.

Nor had she cried when they had returned to a barracks that had been too empty and too quiet, as lifeless as the crypts through which they often crept, stinking of adrenaline and stale sweat and the sweet sage they chewed to clean their teeth. It wasn't until she had gone into the communal sleeping quarters and seen an acolyte stripping the linens from Johannes' cot that the tears had overwhelmed her resolve. She had turned and scissored down the hall to the laundry room, where she'd tucked herself between the ancient washer and the even more prehistoric hand wringer and wept into the grungy folds of her cassock. Stone under her ass and fabric bunched in her fists, and when the hitching cries had threatened to turn into keening walls that carried down the corridor and betrayed her weakness to the others, she had pressed the meat of her palms to her mouth and muffled them with numb, salty flesh. When she had come out sometime later, blinking against the burning scald of lingering tears and tottering on unsteady legs like an invalid, Johannes' cot had still been stark and bare in the somnolence of the hall. _Gone,_ the bed, too, had said, and though the Priest had surely noticed her blotchy face and puffy eyes, he had offered no rebuke. Nor had he offered counsel or comfort. He had merely passed her like a shadow in the night, and though prayers were offered for the souls of the dead, Johannes' name had never been spoken again.

Neither has her own name, come to think on it. To The Church, they are only priests and priestesses, tools to be used and discarded as it sees fit. Names are for those with histories and families, and the Church's chosen are entitled to neither. They live only to serve, and to die at the behest of the bishops and monsignors who live within the shelter of the city walls, protected by thick walls and high parapets and swaddled in luxuries about which the rabble outside can only dream.

There are few who know it, she supposes, and even fewer now that Johannes sleeps beneath the profaned earth of Sola Mira in a bower of sour earth gone black with damp and mold and the unspeakable effluvium of the soulless damned. Her mother and father knew it once upon a time, but she cannot say if they yet live to offer it up in prayers of supplication or send it to the heavens upon a melancholy wish. Her confessor, to whom she was required to lay bare her soul twice a week, and Monsignor Orelas. Monsignor Chamberlain now, who had ascended to the high seat on the council after Orelas' public disgrace. And the members of the training class of which she had been a part. Johannes and Chin and Priest and Khara and Dougal and Harmon. The Church forbad the use of names, but this was a commandment that had been broken freely and often by those who formed small fighting units as a matter of necessity and petty rebellion. A shouted warning to a priest was useless in a room full of nothing but, and grief would brook no anonymity.

Johannes is gone to the undreaming sleep in the dead heart of Sola Mira. The monsignors are indifferent to the sounds that shape her in the minds of others, and Chin, Dougal, and Harmon were lost at New Absalom, martyrs for a cause that had not mourned them. Only Priest and Khara remain, and to them, she is but a good and faithful soldier. Khara's heart belongs to Priest, who will not take it, and the heart of the Priest belongs to a wife that is so much dust and bone beneath the arid earth, and to a daughter of whom he seldom speaks.

In that, she supposes they are the same.

_We all have secret lives,_ she thinks as she weaves through the throng. _And the people who now beseech us to save them from a threat they thought past know nothing of them, nor would they care if they did. The peasant does not weep for the wall battered by siege engines and arrows and pots of boiling pitch. They pray only that it holds and weep for their own fate when it does not._

She plods and scrapes over the asphalt until she comes to the drab, compact square of the market, a concrete block topped by thatch and tarpaper. She taps her sandaled feet on the stoop as she comes inside, and overhead, a tarnished, silver bell clangs from force of weary habit.

The proprietor looks up at the sound of it. "Priest," he says. "Come for the usual?"

"Yes."

He disappears into the storeroom and reappears a moment later with the requested provisions. He lays them on the counter. "There you are. The fish are rather good, all things considered. I did my best with the rest. I wish I could offer better, but with the way things are..." He shrugs his massive shoulders, and the nylon of his suspenders bites into the thin, cotton fabric of his shirt.

She produces a wicker creel from the folds of her cloak and sets it on the counter, and then she steps up to inspect the fish. They're plump and shiny with silver scales, and their glassy eyes are clear. They don't stink, either. She picks up the stringer and deposits them into the creel. It would be better if they were coated in a layer of salt to preserve them, but she's lucky they're as fine as they are, and so she says nothing.

The vegetables are another matter entirely. The tomatoes are either hard and green or red and overripe, soft as decomposing flesh beneath her fingers. The handful of onions are mottled and sloughing their skins, and the cabbage is wilted and slimy. The carrots are stunted and jaundiced, but they might be salvaged in a stew. She takes the carrots and leaves the rest.

"Sorry," the shopkeeper says. "As I said..." He shrugs again.

A quarter tin of flour crawling with weevils. Half a tin of sugar. A sad handful of coffee.

"As I said..." the shopkeeper repeats at her dour huff, and she resists the impulse to fetch him a blow and perhaps dislodge different words from the back of his throat.

She gathers the tins and tucks them into the creel beside the fish, and then she settles the creel over her arm. "Thank you," she says brusquely, and turns to go.

The shopkeeper clears his throat. "There is the matter of payment," he says diffidently. He sidles from foot to foot and wrings his massive hands.

"That is a matter for Monsignor Chamberlain." She hitches the creel into the crook of her arm.

"Yes," the shopkeeper agrees. "But the good monsignor has not seen fit to answer my repeated inquires, and despite what the Church might say, man cannot live by faith alone." He stops, shocked by his own hubris. "I-I meant no blasphemy," he stammers. His face has gone the color of bleached parchment, and he retreats a step despite the counter between them, as though he expects her to leap it and rain Divine retribution upon him in a flurry of blows.

But she only offers a sardonic smile in grudging admiration of his feeble defiance. "I am but a humble Priestess and cannot move the hearts of those I serve. I will raise this matter with my Priest. Perhaps he can move the Monsignor to action."

"Much gratitude, Priest." He offers a graceless, jerky bob that she supposes is meant to be a bow, obsequious in his relief, and she can see beads of perspiration stippled along his hairline.

"May God bless you, my son." She raises her hand and performs the sign of the cross. It's listless, more muscle memory than meaning, and she's turning from him before her hand falls.

"Thank you, Priest," he calls after her as she pushes through the door, but she hardly hears him. His empty gratitude is as useless as his rotten food.

It's raining when she steps into the street, and she stops to pull the hood of her cassock over her head. Her peripheral vision vanishes, and the smells of dust and warm flesh tickle her nostrils. The rain beats a percussive timpani in her ears, and her breathing is a sussurrating, tidal roar in her ears. Her feet crunch and slap on the gritty asphalt, and she fumbles to conceal the creel beneath the folds of her cloak.

The street floods quickly, and she watches as cigarette butts and scraps of paper drift past on the current. The water, clear when it fell from the Lord's heaven, quickly turns a dingy, soapscum grey as it swirls around her feet and soaks her shoes.

i_Clinging to the Word of the Church has made us no cleaner_, she muses dourly as the rain sluices down a pocked wall and sends streams of black grime into the torrent.

She had heard tales in her youth of a time when the world had not been so lifeless, so besieged by filth and grime and squalor. In the time before the Wars, it had been green and fertile and fecund. There had been rivers bursting with fish and seas teeming with life. The earth had yielded a plentiful bounty, and the fruit of the trees had been lush and plump and sweet as honey and ambrosia on the tongue. The dogs had been friendly then, not snapping, snarling curls with matted fur and weeping eyes and skin stretched taut over jutting bone. Cats had carried more than fever and fleas, and people had kept birds as pets, scraps of color and song kept in gilded cages. The air had smelled sweet and been cool against the skin, and it had not tasted of death and ashes.

She would love to believe such tales, these joyous fever dreams of bygone days, but she has seen no proof of them. On her few forays beyond the city walls, she had seen only miles of dust and sand and the bleached bones of men and beasts. Once, she had found the pitted, rusty handles of an old bicycle and the innards of a radio unspooled across the dry, scouring sand like innards, but there had been no magic in them. They had been only relics of a dead world whose shape she did not understand. The only life on that endless yellow expanse had been the warmth of Johannes' hand on her shoulder as he had pulled her away from the scattering of junk and bid her catch up with the others, who had pulled ahead, their shadows long and thin and tantalizingly cool on the burning sand. Back to the march. Back to the mission.

Always the mission.

The only birds she had ever seen were the sleek, black carrion crows who plucked the eyes from corpses and swallowed them down like sweetmeats with a caw of relish.

Water rills down the back of her cassock and runs into her shoes, and she grimaces at the cold wetness. The barracks come into view, low-slung and grim and smudged with soot. Water runs over the eaves to create a drenching waterfall in front of the scarred wooden door, and she muffles an oath as she dashes underneath it, the creel and its precious cargo clutched to her belly. She spits hair and water from her mouth and brushes the soaking hood from her face. Her teeth chatter as she shifts her grip on the wicker creel, and then she shifts it to her hip and passes her palm over the outmoded bioscanner mounted beside the door. The scanner ponders her offering of supplicatory flesh, and then it releases the tumbler with a cheerful beep.

"You, too," she murmurs, and shoulders her way inside.

The interior is as charmless and cold as the exterior, with concrete floors and unadorned stucco walls from which plaster flakes like snow, but it's warm and alive with the murmur of voices and the scrape and shuffle of feet. She pushes the dripping hood from her face and shakes the water from her hair, and after she closes the door behind her and toes off her sopping shoes, she troops through the empty dining hall and into the order's tiny kitchen.

"Mind your dripping," the cook says by way of greeting, and wags a wooden spoon at her.

Mariel has been the cook here for as long as anyone can remember. Rumor had it that she had fought in the first and second vampire wars and would've fought in the third had not a vampire queen torn off her leg in a failed assault on a hive east of New Absalom. These days, she holds court in the kitchen, a formidable woman with broad shoulders and thin, pinched lips and a shock of silver hair twisted into a ruthless, plaited chignon atop her head. Her hands are coarse and wide and hard from years of hard labor, but they handle knives and weapons with equal and awesome dexterity. Hands that had once cleaved heads from spasming, spurting necks now dispatch hapless vegetables and hunks of gristled meat with grim ferocity and martial efficiency.

"Yes," Priestess Mariel," she says, and carries the creel to the counter for her inspection.

The old woman stumps over, the leather bracings of her prosthesis creaking as she comes. She stows the wooden spoon in the belt cinched snugly at her waist and throws open the creel like the doors of a conquered stronghold.

"Mm," she says as she peers at the fish and prods it with a blunt, critical finger. "These'll do," she pronounces at last, and plucks them from the basket. She is less impressed with the rest, however. She jabs the wilted vegetables with a moue of disgust. "Barely edible."

"According to the shopkeep, he did his best."

"Of course he did," she sneers, and sets the subpar comestibles aside with a dispirited plop. "Says the same thing every trip, and every trip, his best gets a little worse." She eyes the trio of tins. "I don't suppose those are any better?"

"No. Weevils in the flour and precious little of either sugar or coffee."

Mariel picks up the nearest container and shakes it. "Hmph." She sets it down again. "We pay more and more, only to get less and less. Soon, I'll be down to feeding the acolytes hardtack and leek broth, and those fools will have the gall to howl about weakness and lack of stamina. Even the Scriptures to which the Church so tenaciously clings acknowledge the need for bread. Maybe if they tightened their own belts about their soft, ample middles, the boots on the ground wouldn't be in such sorry shape."

She holds her tongue. The upheaval that had accompanied Monsignor Orelas' public and humiliating ouster had been the topic of conversation among the rank and file for months, and when Monsignor Chamberlain had announced the reformation of the orders, there had been hope that their lot would improve, but those hopes had been short-lived. Chamberlain was sympathetic to their needs, but the previous wars had depleted the Church's coffers, and the High Council squabbled endlessly over the meager remnants. While some, like His Eminence, favored pouring it into training and supplies for the Orders, the majority chose to devote the funds to fortifying the city walls and conducting a propaganda campaign designed to forestall panic and downplay the rising vampire threat massing beyond the walls. Hence, the walls of the city buzzed with useless industry while the orders, already tattered by years of attrition and neglect, were left to fend for themselves and beat back the gathering darkness by dint of blood and pluck and the luck of God's waning favor.

"You could make a stew, perhaps," she suggests.

Mariel swats at her knuckles with the flat of her spoon. "I need no help running my kitchen, young woman," she snaps.

She raises her palms in submission. "My apologies, Priestess Mariel."

She bows her head in mute deference before she gets another smart rap with the spoon and flees to the relative safety of the barracks. They're empty now save for a lone recruit at the end of the long, narrow corridor, sitting cross-legged at the end of his cot with a book across his knees. The Word, like as not; it's the only book permitted by the Church. Her own copy is long gone, disintegrated into dust by the ravages of time and constant perusal, but she can still recite entire pages and sections from memory. Sometimes she mutters them under her breath when she walks or breathes them into the concrete with her forehead pressed to the floor, fingers curled around the beads of her rosary. The roil and oily roll of the words on her tongue are more comforting than the prayers that burn inside her like a simmering fever.

i_Johannes and I passed passages to one another through the smoke of the cookfire,_ she remembers as she heads for her own pallet and the rumpled rucksack puddled at its foot._ They were poetry in his mouth, sly and tinged with mischief and smoke and a secret shared. Sometimes he whispered them into my ear when we bedded down for the night beside the sleepy embers. Soft as a sigh against my ear and warm as a caress against my flesh. There was a promise in them whose shape I could not discern, dared not, and an invitation I could not accept._

_But you wanted to, _whispers a voice inside her head, and the warmth of a phantom hand blooms against the spar of her hip and spreads over the pale, white plain of her belly. _And so did he, if the urgent heaviness pressed against the swell of your ass was any indication. Heaven knows how you might have abased and dishonored yourselves if honor and oath had not compelled restraint, if the watchful eyes of the Priest had not been upon you. Hot breath at your nape and pulsing want hidden between your slumbering bodies._

She turns from the memories, mouth dry and eyes stinging. She snatches her rucksack from the floor, digging her fingers into the rough nap of the burlap to banish the scrape of callused fingertips against the smooth, sensitive flesh of her outer thigh, and turns to retrace her steps. Down the end of the corridor, his head bowed to his book, the acolyte notices her not at all.

She is not surprised. She is a ghost here, and no more. She leaves the room as soundlessly as she entered it, rucksack hanging from her hand like a fetter.

The bathrooms are small, shabby rooms that smell of soap and sage and damp towels and cassocks. There are too few for the number of people who must needs use them, and most of the time, there is an impatient bottleneck of swishing robes and fraying tempers waiting for an opportunity for a piss and a shower and three minutes of quiet beneath a sputtering spray of tepid water that smells of earth and sulfur, but the gloomy, claustrophobic hallway is as deserted as the barracks. There have been a spate of desertions in recent weeks, with disillusioned acolytes simply taking their thin bedrolls and leaving their white acolytes cassocks on the ends of their cots, but even so, there should be more activity. She hesitates before the door to the Priests' bathroom and considers returning to the kitchen to ask Priestess Mariel where the others are, but in the end, the prospect of shedding her wet robes and scouring the grit of the city from her goosepimpled skin proves too tempting, and after rapping thrice upon the door to ensure the room's vacancy, she nudges it open and steps inside.

She curses softly as she scrapes her hip on the rounded lip of the basin sink. The towels have fallen from the flimsy metal rack and lay on the floor like the sloughed skin of a scabrous serpent, and the bleary, warped mirror is fogged with condensation. There's a water stain on the ceiling, and the plaster surrounding the calcined showerhead sags leprously, undermined by years of water and steam. The shower curtain has torn from the ring on one end and droops on the rod. Someone-an acolyte-she suspects-has tried to repair the damage with the enthusiastic application of duct tape, but it's already beginning to peel, and she doubts it will last the week. The soap dish inside the distained, fiberglass stall is covered in a thick rime of soapscum, but it's mercifully devoid of soap silvers caked in coarse hairs and reeking of urine and sour sweat.

She sighs and drops her rucksack beside the sink, and then she sheds her wet robes and stuffs them onto the towel rack. She had taken more care once upon a time, had once hung them from the rack with care and smoothed the wrinkles and straightened the hem, but that had been before, when the barracks had been clean and in good repair and bustling with warriors brimming with youth and the might of righteousness. There had been no water stain on the ceiling, then, no crumbling plaster. The cause had been just, and the faces had been familiar. There seems little point to such fastidiousness these days. Now the warriors and the great cause that had united them in blood and sacrifice have flown or fallen, and all that remains are the old warhorses too numb and broken to leave the only path they have ever trod.

So the robe drapes the towel rack in a wet muddle and drips water onto the towels beneath it. The water that emerges from the spigot is the color of old rust and smells like copper shavings. She bathes in silence and brushes her teeth with a wet finger and a sachet of sage, and when she's done, she gets out and dresses in her summer under-robe. The fabric is light and cool around her calves as she combs her hair in front of the bespotted mirror. She should plait it, but that, too, holds little importance these days, and so she leaves it loose and pads from the room in her bare feet, her rucksack in hand.

She returns it to its place at the end of her pallet and betakes herself to the kitchen again. Mariel has been busy in her brief absence, and the air is thick and sharp with the tantalizing aroma of fish stew.

"It smells delicious," she says as she enters.

"It would smell better if I'd had more flour to spare, but it was either decent broth or a chance at bread, and the bread fills better and keeps longer. Not like the flour was all that fine," she notes bitterly. "More weevils than wheat, truth be told. Least you'll see a measure of extra protein."

The talk of food makes her stomach rumble, so she changes the subject. "The barracks are quiet. Where is everyone?"

Mariel shrugs. "I'm not privy to the Priest's counsel. This saw to that." She stamps her prosthesis on the concrete floor with an indignant crack. "I've heard a fair few whispers, though, and from the number of clandestine meetings between he and Priestess Khara in isolated corners of late, I'd wager there's a mission afoot." She bustles to the pot and lifts the lid to stir the bubbling contents.

"A raid?"

"As I said, I'm not privy to the workings of his mind," she retorts waspishly. "All I know is that he breezed in here in a billow of cassock shortly after you left for the market and ordered everyone to scour the city in search of supplies. I think he would've sent me if he thought he could manage it. I've never known him to do that for a simple raid."

"What else would it be? We don't have the manpower for an assault on a hive. We'd need twice the number, maybe thrice, and not in raw acolytes, either."

"I'm well aware of what we'd need. And so would he be if he had any sense. He's been half-mad ever since that business over in New Absalom with his daughter. Obsessed with tracking down that hybrid vampire he swears he saw." She snorts and opens a cabinet to her left. "That the vampires might be regrouping for a renewed assault on the cities I can buy. They're shrewd creatures for all their godlessness. But the very idea of a vampire who looks like a man and walks in the day." She shakes her head.

The man in the black hat had become the stuff of incredulous legend among the Orders. It had caused an uproar when Priest had returned from his unauthorized foray into the wastes with Priestess Khara at his side and the severed head of a vampire in his fist. The city had buzzed with accounts of how the Priest had marched into a meeting of the High Council and tossed his grisly prize at the feet of a thunderstruck and blustering Monsignor Orelas and accompanied it with a tale of an organized assault upon the city by a seething horde of vampires. The stories had grown wilder in the telling, nurtured by fervid imaginations and liberal consumption of beer and wine, but beneath the layers of fanciful ostentation had been a pithy nugget of truth no less scandalous for its simplicity. The vampires, after long years of lassitude and dwindling numbers, had returned in force and conspired to enter the city hidden in a supply train. That the plan had been thwarted at the last moment by Priest and an ad hoc band of determined cohorts had been mere chance. Or Providence, as the Church had styled it.

The Monsignor had tried to suppress the rising alarm, but the decapitated head lying at his feet had been no mere rumor to be quelled by lofty words and abjurations to faith and trust. Nor could he stop the people from streaming from the cathedral to see the proofs of Priest's claims in the smoke that rose in the distance. A few of the more intrepid witness had claimed to have seen the wreckage of the train itself, a smoldering mangle of charred bodies and twisted metal strewn over the uprooted tracks, but these she calls liars. The Church would never have allowed the people to leave the safety of the walls, not even for such a spectacle as that.

The high clerics _had _seen, however, or so the story went as it wended its way through the Order grapevine. Monsignor Chamberlain had led the others from the cathedral and bid Priest lead them to the wreckage, and he and Priestess Khara had led them from the city and across the burning sand to see for themselves. There are no official records of what they saw there, gathered around the ruins of a train with the hems of their cassocks flapping at their ankles and dragging in the sand, but when they had returned to the city shortly thereafter, the balance of power within the ranks had shifted. Monsignor Orelas had stepped down as head of the High Council a few days later, and Monsignor Chamberlain had reinstated the Orders before his ass had warmed the seat. The Church's wayward children had been summoned from the far-flung corners of the city and assigned to the various squadrons, and Priest had been appointed liaison to the High Council.

The first intimation of a man in a battered, black had come, not from the Council, or even from Priest, who had been staunchly mum on the topic at first, but from travelers from distant outposts who staggered into the city with wares to ply and tales to sell in exchange for a beer and a spot at crowded bars. They quaffed tinpot gin and shots of bathtub rye, and when the booze had oiled their tongues and washed the dust from their throats, they'd spoken of a man with yellow eyes who wandered the desert in a faded duster. The first reports had named him naught but a solitary traveler who traversed the sands, head bent to the wind and lips sealed against any invitations to conversation. Some said he was badly scarred, wattled, bloodless flesh stretched taut over bone and sinew, but they were overruled by others who claimed he was hale and whole and deceptively fast, long strides eating up the desert hardpan. The more fanciful among them thought him a ghost, while the more pragmatic had supposed him just another farmer driven from his livelihood by the merciless vicissitudes of nature.

Few in the Order had given these romantic notions much thought, knee-deep as they were in the grunt work of reestablishing the daily routines and rituals of life in the barracks, but Priest had grown pinched and remote and taciturn with acolytes and abandoned his administrative duties for long intervals, returning days later with dust on his clothes and new lines etched into his perpetually-pensive face. Hours customarily set aside for meditation and study were spent in grueling training sessions, and there was precious little laughter after. Studying came much later, by the wavering glow of candlelight, and prayers were often interrupted by orders to patrol the grounds or venture into the city for reconnaissance.

The stories they carried to him had been the stuff of mad fantasy. The walker in the desert was no longer a hapless farmer or a wandering spirit. Now he was a vampire, a daywalker whom the sun's rays could not touch. Terrified settlers appeared in the city with tales of slaughtered livestock and dogs screaming in the night, and of children sent on errands from which they never returned. An old washerwoman had hobbled into the city one morning just before dusk, blood in her hair and on her clothes and lingering madness in her eyes. She had clawed at passersby with dirty fingers and beseeched them to deliver her from the demon with golden eyes. An acolyte had ushered her into the barracks for a meeting with Priest, and the novices had clustered around the door to hear her tale as best they might. The only thing to emerge from the room had been Priest, who had emerged with iron in his spine and fire in his eyes and ordered the assembly of a search party. He and Khara had taken a handful of acolytes to scour the desert as far as Mira Sola, but they had returned with nothing but windburn on their faces and sand in the creases of their robes. There had been no demon, no golden-eyed wanderer who rode the wind and breathed death from his mouth. According to the acolytes who had passed the story along with their daily bread, they'd found only the blackened husk of a burnt-out homestead and fragments of crockery and personal bric-a-brac. There weren't even any bodies or dead dogs bested by slavering, scavenging coyotes. Just a tin windmill rattling in the sultry breeze.

Far from satisfying Priest, the discovery had only unsettled him more, and he and Khara had marched their straggling band of dogged acolytes thither and yon, making inquiries of anyone they met. They had only repeated the outlandish accounts of a yellow-eyed drifter who left no footprints in the sand. They had even questioned the remaining residents of New Absalom, the ramshackle dust-and tumbleweed settlement that had still borne the scars of his last journey there. The grim, hollow-cheeked residents had said nothing and waved him on and watched his retreating back as he went. He would have willed them to tramp through the barren hinterlands if Priestess had not insisted they turn back before the acolytes were squandered on a fruitless chase. He had come back more remote and secretive than ever, and even Priestess Khara could scarcely move him to speak. He simply brooded and watched and waited.

Delayed grief, she thought, or fresh despair at being reunited with his daughter only to leave her again, but then, he had summoned the Priests to counsel and spoken of a yellow-eyed vampire who walked in the sun. The rumors were true, he had informed them with grim solemnity; a daywalker had thwarted the sun's rebuke, and it was he who had nearly brought the city to its knees with a trainful of blind, obedient servants bent to his will. Priestess Mariel, her pegged stump propped on a cushioned footstool had surveyed him in impassive silence for a moment before declaring him either a fool or a liar. Priestess Khara had remained silent.

Then Priest had turned his gaze to her. _And you. What do you believe, Priestess?_ he had asked quietly.

She had studied his face, searching for signs of lunacy or deceit, but she had found only weariness and a restless, chafing anguish.

_I do not know, _she had confessed._ I have never known you to lie, Priest, or to succumb to flights of hysterical fancy, but it seems too fantastical to be believed that vampires have created a human hybrid capable of withstanding the purifying light of the sun. Surely there would have been signs long before now-unexplained disappearances, for instance_.

Priestess Khara had spoken at last, _Who's to say there haven't been? Not even the Church can account for all the souls who dwell in the city. If a beggar or two were to vanish, they wouldn't be missed._

_Surely the Church would have told us about such a dangerous development,_ she had protested.

The Church has its secrets. Priestess Mariel had shifted in her seat. _The fewer who know, the easier they are to keep._

_Besides, the Church has grown complacent and indifferent in its peaceful, unchallenged dotage_, Priest had noted. _It's been years since the cities were threatened, and the infrequent skirmishes outside the walls indicated that the population was in decline. The Church wouldn't know about hybrids because they haven't been looking. I found him by chance, and I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen him for myself._

_I saw him, too,_ Khara had offered at last. _Priest has the truth of it._

Priestess Mariel had snorted. _You've taken leave of your senses, Priest,_ she'd declared flatly, and raised her hand to forestall Priestess Khara's indignant defense of his honor. i_I believe you encountered something out there, and I've no doubt that the panicky settlers have seen it, too, but it was a man, for all its strangeness. Man ruined this world in his attempt to save it, and what the hordes didn't annihilate, the radiation and biological weapons did. It's a wonder there was anything living at all once the blighted dust settled and the diseased blood seeped into the earth. There's bound to be consequences, genetic aberration. Go swimming in a cesspool long enough, and the sh-filth sticks. The yellow eyes could be the result of radiation poisoning, and who knows what kind of mutants are lurking in the hinterlands?_

_It wasn't a mutant, _Priest had replied, and the stony conviction in it had made the downy hairs at her nape prickle.

_How can you be so sure? _Priestess Mariel's prosthesis had fallen to the floor with an irascible crack as she'd sat forward, elbows pressed to her knees.

Khara had opened her mouth to reply, but Priest had silenced her with a look. Khara had shot her a miserable, knowing glance and subsided in her seat.

Instead of giving an answer, Priest had reached into his robes and withdrawn a battered, dusty hat singed at the brim and reeking of smoke. He'd tossed it onto the table before him with a flick of his wrist.

_It's a hat,_ she'd supplied, nonplussed, and Khara had shot her another look of inexplicable pity.

_What of it?_ Priestess Mariel had demanded, unimpressed.

_He was wearing it,_ Priest had replied, as though that explained everything. _It proves he exists._

Priestess Mariel had snorted contemptuously. _Any fool can wear a hat, especially one so plain as that. If that's to be taken as an article of faith, then why don't we just drop all pretense and proclaim the whistlings from my backside as the unknowable word of God? It carries the same weight as what you would have us believe._

_You tread near blasphemy, sister,_ Priest had warned, but there had been no threat behind it.

_I speak the truth._ She'd sat back and folded her arms across her chest. The leather bindings of her prosthesis had creaked with the movement. i_You fought a familiar, or some fanatic with delusions of immortality. It's no great feat to sharpen teeth, not when you're tempted to eat the rocks under your feet just to fill your belly. There's a threat out there, that much I'll believe, but it's not some new breed of vampire who walks in the sun in defiance of God's law. Vampires are creatures of death and emptiness. What you suggest is a creature whose existence cannot be. If it has eyes and shows no fear of the sun, then it's alive, possessed of a soul. A vampire with a soul would reduce the Church's foundations to dust and throw into question everything it has taught since the first abomination bubbled forth from its subterranean hole. If it has a soul, then it's every bit a child of God as we are, and maybe all the blood that stains our hands should burn like the Mark of Cain against our willful, murderous hearts. If it has a soul, then maybe we're monsters, too._

She'd shaken her greying head and scoured her teeth with her tongue behind pursed lips. _No,_ she'd said. T_hat's the stuff of heresy, and if you've a drop of sense left in your head, you'll never speak of this again, and certainly not to your confessor. It's dangerous lunacy, and if it reaches the wrong ears, you'll be excommunicated._ She'd fixed him with a steely gaze, but there had been compassion in her voice when next she'd spoken. _It's been a hard ride for you, my lad, harder than most. You've lost much and received neither comfort nor satisfaction from it. It's a heavy burden for anyone to carry, let alone one who's known the taste of life's mercies. Seeing the daughter you gave up for the good of the Church must've been a horrible jolt, especially on the heels of burying your wife and brother. It's a strain too great for anyone, and no one could blame you for going around the bend a few paces._

_I know what I saw, _Priest had insisted with pettish tenacity.

Priestess Mariel had muttered an oath and stood abruptly, wobbling unsteadily as her mismatched legs fought to establish her center of gravity. _Then I suggest you keep the contents of your rather suspect vision to yourself. We've_ _lost far too many as it is. _And with that, she'd stumped out without so much as an inclined head.

Sage advice dispensed too late, as it had turned out. Shortly after that surreal conclave, Priest had been called to a late-night audience with Monsignor Chamberlain. The barracks had rippled and buzzed with uneasy speculation in his absence. Priestess Khara had watched the clock with compulsive irascibility, and even Priestess Mariel, who had had scant patience with him since lending reluctant ear to his fanciful recounting of daywalkers and hard-fought battles contested atop speeding, burning trains, had paced to and fro between her kitchen and the dining hall, muttering under her breath and fingering the small, onyx beads of her rosary. Anxious novitiates had peered from the barred and grated windows like fretful marmosets and passed nervous gossip on puffs of stale breath. Others had clustered in the barracks and whispered amongst themselves as they gathered the fabric of their cassocks around their throats. For all their idle chatter, however, none had given voice to the unsettling thought that had hung over the barracks like a pall, feverish and clammy and dreadful to contemplate.

But Priest had not been excommunicated, called into the darkness never to return. He had returned a few hours later, drawn and silent and exhausted. Priestess Khara had rushed to meet him at the door with a cry of relief, and Priestess Mariel had poked her head from her kitchen long enough to offer a blessing for his return. She had said nothing, had only stood in the hall in her bare feet and looked at him with shadowed eyes. Priest had held no cherished place in her heart, and she had felt only a dim, selfish relief that she would not have to adapt to the unfamiliar yoke of another. She had offered him an indifferent bow and shuffled to her pallet, where she'd dozed under the pretext of meditation until the call to morning prayer.

Far from being defrocked and excommunicated, Monsignor Chamberlain had reaffirmed his status as head priest of the unit, and though the yellow-eyed daywalker was never explicitly mentioned within earshot of the curious novitiates, Priest had been given open and standing orders to pursue any and all threats to the Church and its faithful as he saw fit. Priestess Mariel had rolled her eyes and declared this development a sign of the Church's unchecked descent into impotence and sad irrelevance, but Priestess Khara had unquestioningly and resolutely cast her lot with him and bustled to and fro throughout the city as she carried out his every order, no matter how foolhardy, draconian, or bizarre.

And she? She obeyed. It was, after all, the lot for which she had been destined from the cradle, and she could do naught else.

It's the hat she's thinking of when she speaks, black and battered and reeking of smoke. "But what of Priestess Khara? She says she saw the daywalker, too."

Priestess Mariel gives an indelicate snort. "Loyalty can be a greater poison than drink. She'd swear the sun rose from the center of the earth if he said it was so." Her eyes glitter with unspoken knowledge. "Do you not find that so, sister?" she asks shrewdly.

She thinks of Johannes, of his warmth at her back, and of the spicy smell of him in her nostrils, cardamom and iron and earth and sweat. She turns her head and swallows around the lump that has risen in her throat. "Yes," she confesses to the wall. It's rasping and strengthless, and she clears her throat. "Yes."

The room is silent except for the solid ithock of honed steel on thick butcher block and the burbling bubble of the stewpot, which has reached a full boil and is throwing up a billow of fragrant steam.

"Go on and set the table now." The gentleness in the command scalds and scours, and only the discipline of long years keeps her eyes dry and her shoulders straight as she moves to obey.

She's still setting the table when the door opens to admit the hiss of steady rain and the shuffle and scrape of feet. The scattered acolytes have begun to return from their various errands, and they carry with them the fruits of their labors. One carries a bundle of makeshift crosses wrought from bits of scrap metal and naive faith. Another boasts a bundle of weapons tucked beneath one arm. Still a third holds a sack that clatters as he swings it from his sopping shoulder. Beads, perhaps, or bottles of water collected from the running gutters. Some for blessing, no doubt. They'll boil and bottle the rest.

"Priestess," says the one with the sack, an eager gangle of a boy, no more than seventeen. His eyes are young and soft inside his face, and his skin is yet unblemished by the trials and privations of war.

"Apostle," she replies. She cannot remember his name.

"It's been a while since Priest has asked for so much water. Do you think this means a raid?" he asks, eager and guileless, a kitten leaping at the dancing shadow of a butterfly.

"It is not for me to dispense Priest's wisdom for him, apostle." She sets a plate on the table, followed by a fork with a crooked tine.

"Of course not, Priestess," he says, chastened. "Forgive my impertinence."

"Ten Hail Marys and an Our Father," she murmurs absently, and sets another plate.

"Yes, Priestess. Thank you for your mercy." He bows his head and bobs his knees in an awkward curtsy and scuttles off to deliver his payload to its intended recipient. She reaches for another plate and dimly wonders what he will look like when the vampire's flashing claws and gnashing teeth prove faster than his youthful zeal. If he's lucky, death will come swiftly, in a single ruthless strike. If he isn't, it will be dealt slowly, meted out in a measure of grim and joyless years as loss and hardship and bitter experience slough the years from his face and leach the vitality from his bones.

_Let us speak the truth,_ mutters a darkly-pragmatic voice inside her head that is as deep and implacable as grinding stones. _He is as dead as the abominations he longs to fight. His life was ended the moment the church stretched its shadow across his door. Everything human in him was stamped out beneath its cold, inflexible heel. He is just a vessel now, a tool to be used as the Church sees fit, and when he is of no more use to it-when he can no longer fight for the burden of his wounds or the last vampire has fallen at the end of a holy blade-it will cast him aside and leave him to die with nothing but its meaningless gratitude for comfort. Zeal holds no warmth when you're sleeping in corners and lapping water from the very same gutters from whence you once thought to collect God's favor because the Church can spare neither solace nor coin for its obsolete. motherless children._

Another plate finds the table, and she wonders when she last felt anything at all. The answer seethes and shifts within her bones, light as breath and insistent as sand, and she grits her teeth and turns from it and recites the Lord's prayer until the sensation fades.

_Hope is a powerful force, indeed, my child,_ comes the low, soothing voice of her confessor. _But even it cannot raise the dead._

Though her lips remain silent, her heart utters an oath that would see her to the fires of eternal damnation.

The scrape of the door and the patter of the rain. The flap of wet wool and the scuffle of feet. More acolytes, come home from the hunt. She turns to watch them as they stamp and flap like grackles shaking the rain from their feathers. The women squeeze the water from their plaits, and the young men shake the rain from their boots and scrub the droplets from their hair. Those who see her nod in wordless deference. Those who don't troop toward the barracks to shed their wet robes. The last to enter are Priest and Priestess Khara, his faithful shadow. She stops to stamp the dirt from her feet, but Priest weaves around her and makes directly for the dining hall.

"Priestess," he says brusquely. Water beads in his close-cropped blond hair and drips from his temples in lazy, meandering rivulets. His rosary dangles from one hand, and the small cross hangs at the end of the long strand and twirls in a slow, dreamy circle.

"Priest." The syllable scrapes the back of her teeth like a pebble. "The acolytes have been busy today. It's inspired excitement in some."

He draws closer, and heat radiates from him like heat from a stone. He smells of rainwater and damp wool. He leans forward until their foreheads are but a hairsbreadth apart, and his breath against the bridge of her nose is oddly intimate when he speaks. "There will be a council after vespers tonight."

_So there is to be a raid._ She nods once. "Should I make preparations?"

"Put to mind which of the acolytes under your charge have shown the greatest promise."

She blinks in surprise. "But why?"

"Just do it." There is such steel in the command that she's an acolyte again, flat-footed and cowed. This close, she can see the age in his eyes and the care in his face. He is too thin and too pale and too sharp at the angles and edges. Even as a young man, as yet unblooded by the cruelties and vagaries of war, there had been little of laughter and gaiety in him. Now even those faint traces have been expunged; now there is only melancholy and the cold fire of remorseless purpose.

"As you wish, Priest." She steps back and bows her head.

The only acknowledgment she receives is a narrowing of his eyes and a thinning of his lips, and then he spins from her in a whirl of robes and marches toward the kitchens. A fighter no more, Priestess Mariel is yet a sister of vast experience and incalculable wisdom, and none has a keener eye for judging talent and its potential for development and eventual success. It was she who had judged her squadron fit for battle, who had given the nod that had pitched them headlong into war without end that had claimed them all one by one until only this pitiful remnant remained. She hasn't wielded a blade in twenty years, and yet, she will be at the council tonight, seated at his left hand and charged as his conscience.

_And who will she send to die this time? _asks the cold voice inside her head, the voice of the mountains, and of tombs dark and deep and unattended by God's light. _Whose bones will she damn to an eternity in the godless dark?_

To that she can find no answer, and so she turns from it and sets another plate on the table.

The next time she sees Priest, it is in the long, thin hours after midnight, and the acolytes are all in bed. It is only the priests now, clustered around one end of the table in the dining hall. He sits in the simple, wooden chair, fingers curled around the armrests. Priestess Khara sits at his right, and to his left, Priestess Mariel sits with her ungainly wooden leg jutting to the side at an unnatural, excruciating angle that makes her eyes water to look at it. She sits to Mariel's left, her own legs tucked far beneath the chair and her feet close together.

"We leave on a hunt tomorrow," Priest announces without preamble, and even Khara is surprised. Her face betrays nothing, but her brown eyes shift to study his profile from beneath oildrop eyelashes.

"So soon?" Mariel says into the bewildered silence that greets this pronouncement. "Found the the Antichrist in those death-blasted hills, have you?"

Priest does not laugh. "We pursue the daywalker. There have been reports of daylight attacks between Sola Mira and New Absalom. Livestock at first, but the last few have been on traveling merchants and remote settlers. The most recent was an old woman and her two young grandchildren."

"There were witnesses?" Khara leans forward in her chair, and her glossy black plait falls over her shoulder and the swell of her breast like an undulating serpent.

Priest purses his lips. "Those who discovered the bodies reported that their throats had been torn out and that they were drained of blood, both signs of a vampire attack."

"In broad daylight," Priestess Mariel points out. "Which is impossible."

"And yet, it is so."

"So say you," she counters. "It's far more likely to be the work of mutants, brigands, or some wretched combination of the two. Evil doings, yes, but not the business of our kind."

"It is not," Priest insists doggedly. His fingers have tightened around the armrests, and a vein pulses at his temple. "It's the work of the daywalker, and I mean to take him before he inflicts more damage."

"You insufferable mule of a man," she hisses, and slaps the arm of her own chair with a resounding crack, flesh kissed by the punishing knout. "I tire of your games and your reckless fantasies. How can you be so sure that this precious phantasm of yours exists? Tell me, brother, and swiftly, with more than a dusty hat to prop your claims, because I am too old and have lost too much to sacrifice all that I have left to the pursuit of imaginary monsters." Her normally placid grey eyes are ablaze with righteous fury, and the silver of her hair is pale moonglow in the dim, uncertain flicker of the light from the sconces mounted along the walls at haphazard intervals.

"Because I know," he says simply. He folds his hands beneath his chin and continues. "Because I've seen him. I've fought him, have felt his flesh beneath my hands. I have felt his bones within my grasp. I have seen his malice and heard his blasphemy, and I will brook no more of either. Because I saw him through the smoke and flame as he rose to the heavens with my daughter in his arms." His voice rises with every word until it is a song of bombast and blood, a homily delivered from the mouths of avenging angels.

But Priestess Mariel is not one to be cowed by sound and fury, not after a lifetime of blood and steel upon the lifeless, pitiless sands beyond the city walls. She laughs, a bitter caw of contempt. "That is your proof? Then by your own admission, this hunt is nothing but a wild goose chase. You said yourself that you blew him to his judgment atop that train. Now you would have me believe that he survived the blast? There's not a vampire on this misbegotten earth that can withstand the purification of flames. To suggest otherwise is blasphemy. If you aren't a madman or a heretic, then you're a fool bent on chasing ghosts."

"I thought him destroyed. Now I am not so certain. There have been too many whispers, too many rumors-"

"Too much longing in your heart." Disbelieving and beseeching. "You are desperate for purpose, for a reason to keep fighting. You would fight shadows if you could make an enemy of them. Enough, brother. Enough. Fight the monsters that remain and make your peace with whatever comes after. But don't ask us to follow you into perdition for the sake of company."

"I have seen him, too." Khara smooths the fabric of her cassock over her knees.

"And that would carry more weight, sister, if I knew whether you saw him with the eyes of your heart or the ones in your head."

Khara drops her gaze and shifts in her chair.

For a moment, no one speaks. Then, Priestess Mariel murmurs, "I mean no rebuke, sister, nor would I impart shame when there is no need of it. Loyalty is a blessing, and the world would be poorer for its absence, but it bends will and distorts the truth when it burns too hot."

"The truth is the truth, and I know what I saw," Khara replies staunchly, and casts a furtive, sidelong glance at Priest.

Priestess Mariel only smiles. "In that we are agreed, sister. Which is why I refuse to let this go any further. There is no daywalker, Priest. I will not countenance this hunt."

"I don't need your approval, Priestess, merely your obedience. The Monsignor himself has ordered this hunt."

She gapes at him. "The Monsignor?" she repeats incredulously. "You've infected him with this madness?"

"He has given me full authority in this matter."

Priestess Mariel shakes her head. "No," she says flatly. "I refuse to believe he sanctioned this. If he did, it's because you've told him some faint shade of the truth." She heaves herself out of her chair and starts for the door.

"The meeting isn't over, sister," Priest calls.

"It is for me. I'll have no part in this. I didn't train and feed these children of God just to see them used as fodder in some quixotic quest. I'm going to the Monsignor. Pray God he'll still see reason."

"He has seen it, which is why he has given me his grace. And if forced to choose between a priest who has seen battle against the enemy and carried proof of a tale thought wild in his hands and one who who has spent the last twenty years in a kitchen, boiling fish and scouring pots and bestowing blessings upon the dishwater, who will he believe?"

"Priest!" Khara exclaims, shocked at such uncharacteristic harshness.

_Whatever happened on that train changed him,_ she thinks as she watches the exchange in silence. _And not for the better._

_Grief always leaves its awful mark, child,_ says the lilting voice of her confessor, and she reaches into her robes with absent fingers and pulls out her rosary. She watches, unblinking, and lets the beads drip through her fingers like blood.

Priest has the grace to look abashed. "Sister, I-" he begins, but the old priestess cuts him off.

"Sometimes I think we lost more than one good man at Sola Mira. Now I know," she says coldly, and then she whirls on her heel, plait slicing the leaden air like the flaying tongue of a lash, and departs. The sharp rap of her wooden leg on the concrete floor echoes in the strained silence, the weary ticking of a dying clock, and then she's gone.

No one speaks until the sound fades. "Do you share her misgivings, Priestess?" he asks listlessly.

She shrugs and smooths the end of her golden plait. "It is only for me to obey. I am but a tool of the Lord, to be used as you see fit." _And I pay my debts._ For an instant, the memory of wool and warm flesh tingles in her fingertips, and she curls her fingers into fists to blot it out.

A nigh-imperceptible nod, and his fingers relax on his armrests. "Gratitude, sister. Faith would be even more appreciated, but in this case, I'll take what I can get." He settles in his chair and stretches his long, white fingers until they tremble and the knuckles crack. "As I said, we leave in the morning."

"Why so soon? We scarcely have the provisions for the necessary kit. One of the acolytes brought some holy water, but if this creature is as fearsome as you say, I doubt it will be of much use. Even the juvenile vampires have gotten good at avoiding it these days, and aim in combat is iffy at best. I can help the acolytes make more crosses tonight, assuming we have the materials, but you've said yourself that they have little effect."

"They don't," he agrees, and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "But they'll serve against the lessers and provide some comfort to the acolytes."

She blinks. "The acolytes," she repeats, and utters a humorless bark of laughter as comprehension dawns. "You can't possibly mean to bring acolytes on this hunt. They're half-trained. At best. And their training is but a shadow of what ours was, of what they need to survive. For God's sake, most of them are still children. A few of the girls haven't had their first cycle yet."

"She's right," Khara says. "I'm not sure half of them would last against an average vampire, let alone one impervious to holy water and crosses. It would be a massacre."

"I know. You're right. But there is no choice."

"Why not?" she presses him. "Why not bide our time, build our resources and our manpower? If we wait, some of the acolytes might make it to priesthood. Our numbers would be stronger, and by then, Monsignor Chamberlain will have established his authority and been able to provide better supplies."

"Training acolytes takes years, and public opinion is fickle. The same people who now cry for our help because they've glimpsed the severed head of a vampire and who treat us with fearful reverence will be doubting and heaping scorn upon our heads when a month goes by with no ripple in their peaceful little existence. Our situation is more likely to be worse a year from now than better, and if Orelas can get backing and make a run at reclaiming his seat, we could well find ourselves disbanded again, if not excommunicated outright and branded as heretics."

"That's a bit paranoid, don't you think?"

"Maybe, but maybe it's not, and what then? We'll be scattered and powerless, while he's free to roam and kill and replenish his forces under our noses."

"He," she prods relentlessly. "He, he, he. You speak as though you were an intimate familiar. Who is he that you are so eager to shed his blood? If I didn't know better, I'd say this was personal."

His eye twitches. "Isn't it enough that he is an affront to God's intended order?" He scratches his elbow with rough, close-bitten nails. "Our current situation is hardly ideal, and any casualties we suffer will be regrettable, but we don't have the luxury of time."

"Luxury!" she shrieks. "It's a luxury now not to hurl the lives entrusted to our care to a meaningless death? This thing killed three priests with scant effort and even less hesitation, and you would challenge him with ill-prepared children?" She shakes her head and tugs furiously on the end of her braid. "That isn't bravery or noble self-sacrifice, brother, that's hubris."

"Madness?" he offers drily, but there is no humor in it, only a grating bleakness.

"That's the kindest word for it," she retorts.

He straightens, and though his eyes are full of sorrow, there is no tenderness in his voice, only the pitiless inflexibility of the Church. "I understand your objections, sister, and the man in me shares them. If I could, I would turn from this path, but I am a priest, the hand of God on this earth, and I am bound to do His will. As I must obey, so must you. Will you obey?"

"Yes," she answers dully, and her shoulders slump. "But I would have it known that there is no honor in this. It's so much screaming into the wind for the pitiful consolation defiance brings before the end."

"Noted," he says, and she's surprised at the gentleness of it. "Now, which of the acolytes do you think have the best chance of survival?"

"Truthfully?" she croaks, and rubs at her stinging eyes with cool fingertips. "None. As to which might at least find a dignified death beneath the enemy's heel, there's Mills. Sanchez is impressive with the blades when his focus is right, but that's no guarantee. He hasn't yet mastered the desires of the flesh. Fontana has mastered her body, but her pride often overrides her reason. Johnston. Maybe Dunn." She shrugs again. "They're the best of the lot, but as I said, that's not saying much. The rest wouldn't last thirty seconds. They're just children, Priest. Children! If you send them in pursuit of this demon, you might as well call them sacrifices to an insatiable God and be done with it."

_Have I become Mariel so swiftly, then? Evaluating children like chattel and deciding which of them are perfect enough to die in the service of an absent and indifferent Lord?_

"Have you further need of me, Priest?" she asks wearily. "If not, I must make ready for our departure."

"Rest well, sister. We leave for Sola Mira in the morning."

She freezes, hands clawed around the armrests and ass hovering deliriously above the seat like a capsizing dirigible. "Sola Mira," she manages, and she tightens her calves to keep from collapsing back into her recently-vacated seat. Her lungs have gone heavy, and the air they draw is too thick. Her ears hum and sing with the notes of a distant Aeolian harp.

"The most recent sightings put him just south of there," Priest replies from the vast expanse of a bottomless well.

"Mm," she grunts as though that explains anything. She wills herself upright and forces herself to meet their gazes. She's too cold. Her hands are freezing, and her stomach flutters and cramps beneath the fabric of her cassock.

"Are you all right?" Priestess Khara asks, and advances on her with hand outstretched. She's joined Priest in the vastness of the well.

She flinches from the well-intended contact. "I'm well, Priestess. Thank you," she answers with ludicrous formality.

_Oh, I've committed a dreadful sin,_ she thinks with woozy giddiness. _I've uttered a lie before the face of God._

She wheels on treacherous feet and flees their solicitous scrutiny before her wobbling knees can expose her deceit. Pride keeps her gait steady until she gains the concealing solidity of the corridor wall that leads to the barracks, and then she staggers and lurches for a few steps before the strength ebbs from them altogether and she sags against the rough, buttressing plaster.

_Sola Mira._ The high, rocky outcrop of the hive rises in her mind's eye against a flat, red sky the color of rust and suppurating infection. Nothing lives in its sandy soil. Nothing flourishes there but death and sorrow. The wind howls and raises sand yellow as pus, and in the depths of the hive's corrupted shadows, bones bleach to white beneath the skitter and patter of small, inhuman feet.

_Life goes on, child, and so must you_, her confessor urges._ Longing will not raise the dead. One foot in front of the other, that's the only way it can be._

She pushes away from the wall and is confused at the muffled clack from her hand. Her rosary dangles from her fingers, and her palm prickles and smarts where the beads have dug into the flesh. She sways as she threads the glittering black beads through trembling fingers, and when she's sure she won't simply fold to the floor with the first ginger step, she shuffles towards the barracks and the neat double row of billets arranged on the floor.

_One foot,_ she tells herself. _One foot at a time. _The rosary beads rattle and clack in time to her footsteps, and she breathes slowly and deeply in time with her heartbeat. Eventually, grace returns to her stumbling, fumbling limbs, and she nimbly picks her way through the sleeping bodies until she reaches her pallet.

She sinks to the floor, legs crossed and spine straight and rosary threaded through her folded hands. The cross rests against her palm, light and cool, but she draws no comfort from its familiarity, or from the soft, sussurrating sounds of sleep from the acolytes who slumber around her. The knowledge of what waits for her on the edge of tomorrow has awakened old grief and stirred painful memories. She should meditate, should pray for God's mercy and guidance, but when she closes her eyes there is only empty blackness and the aching awareness of absence, of the bump and scrape of a shoulder no longer there.

It isn't until she draws a deep breath and thinks of cardamom and sweat and sun-warmed earth that the cramp in her stomach uncoils. Cardamom in her nostrils, sweet and sharp and safe, and her muscles go slack with relief. Cardamom, and peace comes at last. Cardamom, and the unceasing tumult in her head and heart stills, the raging tempest of a boiling sea replaced by the glassy, shimmering stillness of a pond in summer, with green grass beneath her bare feet and golden sunlight on her shoulders. No terror now, no endless yearning and an ache that never eases no matter how fervently she prays for surcease and serenity. Just an indistinct figure on the opposite shore with hand outstretched, beckoning her to him. She smiles and answers the summons, heart rising in her chest as her feet glide across the cool, silver water. She reaches for the proffered hand and lets it pull her to the shore, but as she surrenders to the persistent tug of meditation's current, it isn't God who holds her hand.


	2. Pilgrimage to Sola Mira

The world shifts beneath his feet as he walks. It hisses and sighs with every step, as though it were panting in the arid, simmering heat of the desert. The hood of his cassock shields his face from the sun, but it rests hot and oppressive upon his shoulders, and the hem of his robes flaps around his ankles like a gauzy, parched tongue seeking for moisture on his skin. The black fabric blunts the fierce glare of the sunlight on cracked hardpan and the crudely-worked silver of the crosses tucked into the belt cinched at his waist and obscures his peripheral vision, but he's grateful for the meager protection it affords against sunburn and the abrasive, clawing caress of sand. Right now, the air is heavy and still, dry heat against the exposed skin of his hands, but the weather is mercurial and often intemperate, and there's always the risk of a howling sandstorm to scour the flesh from their faces.

He is not alone on the sands. Other footsteps echo his own, mingled with the rattle of rosary beads in idly-fondling fingers. Priestess Khara matches him step for step. He can't see her, obscured as she is by the deep, belling fabric of his hood, but he can smell her, sage and sandalwood in his nostrils. He can hear her, too-the muted click of her rosary at her hip; the tump and scrape of her slippered feet on the sand; the clatter of the kendo sticks crossed at her back.

And her voice, of course, urgent and incessant as it drifts from her hood like wisps of smoke.

"You have to tell her," it says for the third time in as many miles. As before, he says nothing in the hopes that she will let the matter drop, but she persists, her words nearly smothered by the hiss of her footfalls. "You have to tell her, I said." The nettlesome hum of a small, looming insect.

He's tempted to stop and round on her, to pin her beneath his gaze until she squirms and subsides, but that would attract the notice of even the most dim-witted of the acolytes who trudge behind them in a thin, straggling line, and so he contents himself with increasing his pace and retreating into the concealing depths of his hood.

Priestess Khara is not to be deterred. "Did you hear me?" she asks, and lengthens her stride to keep up. "I said-"

"I heard you the first time," he says abruptly. "What would you have me do?" he demands. "Give me your counsel, sister. "How should I tell her that a brother she thought dead for three years isn't just still alive, but an unholy abomination she is bound by honor to destroy?"

_Not just a brother,_ notes the uneasy voice of conscience inside his head. _It was never a mere matter of brotherhood where they were concerned. It was something much deeper and far more tenacious, rooted in the marrow and sinew. It was something you dare not name, something forbidden by the Church under penalty of excommunication and exile. It was love, raw and pure and all-consuming. The book to which they had dedicated their lives in the name of humanity and at the behest of cold men with pitiless hearts proclaimed it the greatest of these, the sweetest of God's gifts, and yet it was denied them, a fragment of honeycomb forever out of reach._

_And yet, they tasted of it all the same, or at least dreamed of its savor upon their lips. They were children when they met, small, scrawny children ten years your junior, wide-eyed and nursing the wounds of recent separation from their families. He was all sullen silence and bristling watchfulness, and she was all wordless curiosity and timid gentleness. He was covered in scrapes and scabs and bruises from the priests' disciplining knout, and she was all puffy eyes and tear-stained face and teethmarks embedded in her forearm to muffle the screams provoked by the priestess' lash. Light and dark, meekness and slow-burning fury._

_You pitied them. You pitied all the children whose lives had been forfeited to the grand and mighty cause of salvation. You, at least, had been given the choice assume the stinking, dusty mantle of solitude and privation and eternal isolation, but the decision had been denied them, made for them by frightened parents easily cowed by the grim specter of authority. You had been given the chance to live your life and decide its course, however briefly, to sow your legacy between the willing thighs of a wife you left behind in the dust of your brother's farmhouse. You had known love and happiness and the joy of possibility and could carry with you the memories of Shannon's cheek beneath your hand as you caressed her face and Lucy's fretful, avian cries from the sturdy shelter of her crib. You had known a desire and a faith wholly divorced from the inhuman, inexorable demands of a god who existed only in the thin, faded pages of ancient books. They never would. The only world they would ever know would be the forbidding, grey walls of the Church and the black robes of its ruthless masters, and the only love permitted to them would be the love of selfless sacrifice._

_The spark of humanity is bright and hard to extinguish, and the children, for all their fear and confusion, resisted at first, chafed and bucked against the crushing heel pressed to their throats. They sought refuge in one another after the initial shock of upheaval, tried to forge connections in this strange, inhospitable world. They learned names and faces and reached out with small, grimy fingers to find the touch of a companion in the dark. They found enough innocence within themselves to giggle and whisper and play games when the chance presented itself. In the early days, before the Church brought its terrible power to bear, you were surrounded by children who tittered and squabbled and occasionally exhorted you to join their lively games of tag and Red Rover._

_But the Church, charged with the task of saving humanity from an insatiable foe, could afford neither mercy nor patience, and so it broke them and reforged them into weapons, obedient vessels into which it could pour its discipline and ascetic dogma. Laughter was punished by the bite of the lash, and games were a frivolity that distracted them from God's exacting purpose. Names were a vanity, a conceit of the prideful, and they were erased from tongue and memory alike. There were no Benjamins or Sarahs or Carls; there were only acolytes. Those who dared to speak the names they had once carried, to cling to a past that was of no use to the Church, paid for their hubris in blood, its rebuke written in weltering stripes upon their backs._

_He was small and dark and angry. His anger burned slowly but hot as phosphorous. He resisted with fists and claws and kicking feet, and his shouts of fury often echoed through the halls, the howl of a snared beast. The priests tried to beat the insolence from him at first, to quash it with slaps and blows, but it proved a futile exercise. The smart of bruises and the sting of cuts merely served to stoke his rage, and the more blood that he licked from his split, puffy lips, the more willful he became. The priests exhausted themselves with their efforts, and he remained unbroken, grinning at them from where he sprawled on the floor in a tangle of rumpled wool and battered limbs._

_The Church is a canny, inexhaustible tormentor, and when one method failed, it simply tried another. The priests starved him, deprived him of water for twenty-four hours and forced him to meditate in heavy, woolen robes and recite the Word until his voice cracked and he was forced to plead for water._

Do you repent of your hubris? _the priest would demand, a grown man looming over a boy as he knelt on the floor with his forehead pressed to the concrete and his fingers snarled in the fabric of his teacher's robes._

_If the answer was anything but, _Yes, Father, I repent my sin and ask your tender mercy, _the priest would shake his clawed hands from his robes and press his face into the concrete until he writhed and bid him to recite another verse. If the answer was correct, and delivered with sufficient humility, the priest would reach for a silver ewer and pour the contents over his head._

The Lord will provide my son, _he would intone as the desperate boy lapped water from the stone like a stray cur. Then he would step over him and leave him there, licking water from the footprints he left behind. _

_And if all else failed, if neither fists nor privation could inspire humility and obedience, then they would bind him in darkness and isolation until either his bones or his spirits broke. They stripped him to the waist and bound him at wrists and feet and suspended him in the yawning shadows, stretched him until his tendons strained and his joints threatened to dislocate._

A warrior of God must endure, _murmured the priest as he shut the thick, steel door and turned the key in the lock. _And so must you. _And then they would leave him there as he thrashed in his bonds. Only when he fell silent would they return with their cross and their Bible in hand, and only when he begged forgiveness would they release him. If he were unconscious, they left him to hang until the Lord revived him and moved his tongue to penitent speech._

_Discipline, they called it, the lovingkindness of a faithful, vigilant father, but it was cruelty, petty and malicious and spiteful, vengeance enacted against a boy for the crime of independence. He wasn't their only victim, the only target of their wrath, but he was their favorite, and they would have destroyed him, killed him before he ever saw manhood and cast him aside as an experiment duly tried and failed, a flawed creature not meant for God's holy work despite the grace that flowed through his veins and marked him as one of the chosen. _

_It was she who did what all their organized and meticulous savagery could not. She was quiet and fine-boned and nimble, the very picture of meekness. She was the model acolyte, obedient and eager to please. She excelled in her studies and was devoted to meditation and reflection. She seldom spoke unless spoken to, and always with deference. She trained diligently and beyond even their stringent requirements and acquitted herself admirably if not spectacularly in most disciplines, though when it came to sky-dancing, she had no equal. She was a bird without wings, a goddess on the wind, and even the hardened priestesses-even Mariel, still whole and keen and in full vigor then-watched in awe as she spun upon the air, blades held aloft like majestic, elegant flourishes as she cut down imaginary foes._

_Much to the Church's dismay, her vast potential was marred by her compassion. She was wont to weep when confronted by anguish and the suffering of her fellow acolytes, and though she shared the others' fear and mistrust of the vampires, she lacked their viciousness, their love of the kill. She considered it a duty best done quickly and often wept soundlessly while her blades did their soundless work._

_The Church saw her tenderness as a weakness and strove to rid her of it just as they worked to rid him of his pride. They slapped her face until it bruised and forbid her to cry or cry out. They forced her to bathe in ice water and kneel on rocks beneath the midday sun, and if she flinched or cried or tried to rise, they lashed her. Ten lashes for every cry. They made her stand witness at the punishments of others, and if she wept or betrayed an ounce of pity, she joined them in their castigation, and it was redoubled._

_They were the angry boy and the silent, weeping girl, and they were drawn to each other like the dust to the wind. Sometimes you wonder if it wasn't the hand of God set to its mysterious work that set them upon the same path. In any other lifetime, they would never have met, would have lived and died without ever knowing that the other existed, but the Church in its infinite wisdom and economical brutality brought them together in the service of the Lord._

_She was unwilling, weeping witness to the punishments he endured, and he bore witness to her tears, shed for him in defiance of the Church's monstrous edict. She watched as the skin of his back was scourged raw and blood beaded on his shoulders in sympathy with the tears that streamed down her pinched, blotchy face, and he watched as she keened and hitched and strained against the hand that kept a choking grip on the collar of her robe. To him, she was the voice of justice, crying out for redress, and to her, he was the proof of the Church's inflexible tyranny. They found solace in one another, took comfort in each other's presence and drew strength from the unspoken defiance that whirled and seethed around them like a coalescing storm._

_The Church should have seen, should have known. The bond between them was plain even to you, a child in a man's flesh who still writhed in the throes of your private, wrenching grief. When she was eight years old, that fragile slip of a child bucked so fiercely against the restraining grip of the priestess' iron hand that her robe tore with the sibilant purr of parting seams. When the priestess lunged for her, she was met with a foot to the face that shattered her nose in a spray of blood, and that made the boy laugh as he stood tethered to the whipping post with blood dripping down his buckling legs in lazy rivulets. They should have known when that meek child became a teeth-gnashing dybbuk as she weathered their furious, flailing blows and tried to undo the ties that bound him. But the Church was blind and complacent after years of unchallenged authority. It _refused _to see and persisted in its foolish course, confident that it could conquer the pettish wills of two stubborn children._

_And so the years and the unremitting discipline rolled on, and with every new scar, their resolve and improbable loyalty only grew stronger. And they learned. She still bore witness to his routine humiliations at the hands of his Church masters, but she no longer beseeched them to stop, no longer wept. Instead she stood in stony silence, feet wide apart and hands clasped behind her back. She did not flinch at the crack of leather on exposed flesh or grow pale at the sight of blood. Only her eyes betrayed her anger and anguish, dark and deep and full of secret wrath for those who cared to see it. But the priests did not care and did not question the gradual shift in her behavior and temperament. Indeed, they counted it a victory and smugly congratulated themselves on a job well done._

_He, too, changed. It took years, and far longer than the Church expected, but the wild, intemperate boy grew into a stoic young man who stopped fighting the lash and the strangling confines of Church doctrine and submitted to its will. The Scriptures flowed from his lips as freely as invectives and imprecations once had, and he displayed a startlingly keen mind once he devoted himself to his liturgical studies. He showed great promise as a scholar, in fact, and sometimes when he spoke of his plans for after the war, he talked of undertaking theological studies at a seminary in Vienna. On the rare occasions that he was sent to the lash, he submitted to its correction without whimper or complaint. A remarkable transformation, the priests called it, and preened as they strutted through the barracks and held him up as an example of God's forgiveness and unrivaled power._

_You believed them, too. The Church was all you had in this grinding, deathless, post-Shannon life where all colors bled to grey and everything that touched your lips tasted of ash and sloughed skin, and better to believe than to surrender even that scant comfort._

_The truth came years later, murmured softly on a voice made rough by a lifetime of screaming._

It was her, _he said, knees tucked to his chest as he smoothed his traveling robes over his feet and watched her sleep in the sheltering glow of the fire, and as soon as the words left his mouth, you knew them for truth. _She always watched, never shied from what they did, from the stripes they left upon my flesh.

Brother, what they did, they did for the good of your soul, _you said, but you had no faith in the words, and neither, you suspect, did he._

_He shifted on the hard, flinty soil of the outcropping upon which you sat and brushed dirt from his hands._ As long as she was there, I knew I wasn't alone, abandoned by a God who took pleasure in my agony.

Brother, you tread dangerously close to blasphemy, you warned.

_He shook his head, and his lips twisted in a humorless smile that did not reach his eyes and was too hard for the soft curve of his mouth._ One man's heresy is another man's truth, _he said, and rose with the fluid, feline grace of a shadow. _Goodnight, brother. _He left you without a backward glance and joined her beside the fire. He sat beside her, careful to keep the distance chastity demanded, and pulled his rosary from his robes. Soon, his voice drifted to you on the smoke, low and resonant and solemn as he recited the liturgy. She stirred then, blonde hair a shimmering, golden river in the dancing firelight as she raised her head to blink sleepily at him._

Is it time for my watch, brother?

No, _came the softy reply, and it was gentle, so different from the brusque, taciturn man you knew. _I merely thought to offer prayers for your protection.

_She rolled to face him._ Your thoughtfulness is much appreciated, brother. I will gladly return the favor.

Go to sleep, _he grumbled, but he reached out to flick a pebble from the edge of her thin blanket._

Yes, brother, _she answered dutifully, but she was smiling, and her eyes were bright in the gloom. Her hand snaked from beneath her blanket to pat the filthy, cracked toe of his boot, and then she withdrew it and burrowed beneath the coverlet. She watched him until her body could no longer resist the call of sleep, and when it had claimed her and she lay slack and vulnerable beneath the firmament, he reached out and brushed stray hairs from her temple. His fingertips lingered for a long moment on the pale, tender flesh, and there was such intimacy in in the touch, such yearning, that you shivered in sympathetic recognition. You tensed, prepared to act as the long, law-giving arm of the Church and intercede in the name of piety despite the pang of empathy, but before you could move or speak, he sat back and resumed his pious liturgy, hands folded and face turned heavenward and rosary threaded around his wrists and through his fingers. The black beads twined around his white flesh reminded you so forcibly of the ties that had once bound him to the rack and the whipping post that you turned your gaze from them and muttered a prayer for succor and peace. But you found no peace in prayer that night. You sat in your remove and watched him as he held vigil over her. He never slept, nor did he rouse her for the watch. He took it for her, still and unblinking as he peered into the darkness, and when he gave the call to rise for morning prayer and the meager offerings of the Lord's stale bounty, he waited for her to wipe the sleep from her eyes and the dirt from her hair before he went for his swallow of cold, watery coffee and his mouthful of dry, tasteless bread._

_That moment, that simple touch, a lover's caress stolen in the watches of the night, crystallized the vague suspicions that had drifted through the halls of the barracks like smoke from a hidden fire, and you wondered just when it had started, when the chaste, simple love of brotherhood and common cause had ripened into something sweeter. Perhaps it had begun when they were still children and their bodies had slept, undreaming, unknowing of the longings of weak-willed flesh. Perhaps its seed had been planted in those early acts of defiance, when he had howled his anger and defiance at the heavens and she had strained against the hands that held her, a dog stayed only by a dangerously-fraying leash. Greater love hath no man than he who lays down his life for his brother, saith the Lord, but he who witnesses his suffering and cries out against it is certainly a worthy runner-up. Maybe the love came then, a blessed panacea against the agony that simmered like brimstone in his bones. Certainly it was love that drove her to creep through the rows of pallets in the middle of the night and defy the priests to offer what comfort she could to the sniveling, trembling boy who huddled in his blankets, his welted arms wrapped around himself for comfort. Surely it was love that moved her to whisper his forbidden name and stroke his cheek with gentle fingers until the long, terrible shadow of the priests drew near and bid her retreat And it was most assuredly love that kept her at it even after she was caught and publicly knouted by a cold-eyed Father with a pitiless hand. She went to him with the bruises still fresh and darkening on her abused flesh, scraping and tottering with the ginger care of an invalid, and whispered his name against his cheek._

Johannes, _she called in the stillness, the sibilant, furtive hiss of footsteps in tall grass._

_He did not answer, but lifted his head to scan the room. The movement was enough, and she scuttled to him, her hair the muted glimmer of spun gold in the night. The other children shifted and murmured, disturbed by the skim of her passing feet, but none betrayed her stealthy movement to the priests who patrolled the corridors and lingered outside the door. They were content to return to their dreams or watch the queer spectacle unfolding before them, a dream viewed in a warped, Dickensian looking glass. Their watchful, avid eyes gleamed in the dark, embers from a dozen small fires, and they lit her way as she sought for him among the bodies._

_He had risen to one elbow by the time she reached him, and he blinked in wary befuddlement as she settled herself beside him. _What are you doing here? Go back, _he commanded, and scowled at her._

Does it still hurt? _she asked softly, unperturbed by his pique, and reached out to draw her fingers along the band of raw flesh at his wrist._

_He flinched from the caress and stuffed his hand beneath the blanket. _It's fine, _he snapped, so small and trying so very hard to be brave. He turned to look at her. _What about you?

_She shrugged and instantly regretted it as pain flared anew. _It's not too bad, _she answered, though the lie was plain upon her pale, pinched face._

You're lying, _he said, but there was no accusation in it, only serene, childish truth._

I won't stop, _she swore with sudden vehemence. _I'll never stop. They can't make me. I won't leave you. I'll never leave, and I'll never forget. _Spoken with the true, simple certainty of the innocent._

_It was the hard, unadorned bedrock of love, and in your heartbroken cynicism, you were sure that it must be broken, obliterated before the whims of the Church and the rapacious needs of the many who looked to it for salvation from the abominations that crawled without the city walls and sought entrance with blind, scabrous fingers. How could it not be when your own love, vowed before God and presided over by a member of the clergy whom you now served, had been cast aside in the name of necessity and unsentimental expediency? Your love for Shannon had been strong, forged by kisses and caresses and the headiness of courtship, tempered by the searing, sweat-slick simmer of entwined bodies, and cemented forever in the promise of Lucy, who squalled, plump and indignant and healthy, upon her mother's heaving belly. You'd thought it unbreakable as you'd stroked Lucy's soft, downy head and gazed into Shannon's tired, happy eyes, but then the Church had come with its decree and its lofty abjurations to sacrifice and selfless love, and the bonds you had thought so unimpeachable had dissolved like sand before the cleansing wave. You traded fatherhood for priesthood and the snug, comforting fit of your wedding band for the throttling constriction of your holy vestments and left your weeping wife and child in your brother's front yard, ramshackle remnants of a life you could no longer live. The Church had made a liar of you and called you a better man for it. Of course it would do the same to this precocious, naive child who knew not the power of the words she spoke. She would forget in time, or judge the promise unworthy of the price it demanded, and she would repent of vows rashly taken and become a penitent liar just like you._

_But she hadn't. The promise spilled from the mouth of a babe had endured. She never left him, never turned from hardship to save herself. She was unwavering and implacable and undaunted by threats and imprecations. Long after she learned that she could not shield him from the blows of his teachers or brace him against the rending agony of the rack, the circuit of her daily meditations took her past the whipping post and the cells where wayward acolytes paid their penance. She lifted her voice in song as she passed or tossed verses of comforting Scripture through the bars like a sustaining sweetmeat. When she could, she lingered outside his cell and talked idly of nothing in particular, murmuring softly of the azure sky or the smell of frankincense in the air. Passing acolytes stared and whispered that she was mad, broken by the rigors of training, and priests looked down their long, thin noses at her and commanded her to stop such foolishness and return to her duties, but you understood. It was a message in a bottle, an assurance that the promise held true, that she would not leave, that it would be all right._

_And when he had faith in nothing else, he had faith in that._

_The love had been there all along, seeded in those first punishing months when all they had was their resistance to the Church's benevolent tyranny. It was the passion that came later, the raw, atavistic yearning that roiled between them in a palpable haze that sometimes made the air around them too close. They never fell, never broke the vows of purity and chastity that they recited on bended knee before an unsmiling monsignor with eyes as black as the Bible he held in one slender, bloodless hand, but love endures. Love finds a way. No one knows that better than you, the pious, long-suffering liar whose love burns bright and hot within a heart none but God and a bittersweet memory will ever touch. Their eyes said what their mouths could not as they looked at one across the nave on ordination day, feet wide apart and hands clasped behind their backs, newly-minted soldiers in the mighty army of the Lord, and when the ceremony was over and the crosses etched into their forehead oozed blood down their faces and sent it pattering to the white, marble floor with every bow to their smiling betters, their hands stayed joined a moment longer than was proper as they greeted one another as priest and priestess for the the first time. The Church fathers, buoyed by this latest addition to their holy arsenal, noticed nothing, but you, who had none to call a friend, did, just as you saw him lean down and whisper into her ear. You've always wondered what passed between them that day, but that was a secret he kept to himself, a rosary bead he never allowed to slip from his fingers. _

_The pragmatist in you thinks they should have been separated long ago, before their love had a chance to take root. They should have been sent to different orders and forbidden from future contact, and word should have gone out to all Fathers that they were never to be paired. But classes were small and the pickings slim in the early days of the war, when God's grace had been found in so few of his children, and the Church could not afford to disband such a promising and cohesive class to stamp out the poorly-repressed desires of two headstrong members, not when their transgressions had not passed from thought into forbidden deed. If they could kill the enemy, then it mattered little what sins they committed in the secret places of their hearts._

_Besides, to condemn the Fathers for their inaction would make you a hypocrite. Age and skill made you the natural leader of your order. You could have sundered them the moment they fell under your command, but you let them be because you pitied them, and because their love for one another made them stronger and fiercer and deadlier on the battlefield. While you doubted their faith and loyalty to the Church and its musty, arbitrary doctrine of asceticism and solitude, you never doubted their loyalty to each other. They fought with fire in the blood when they were together, desperate to protect flesh they would never touch or taste. He offered up his bones as a sacrifice to her safety, and her blood rained down from the heavens in a fine mist to keep him whole, and the blood and bone united you all in benediction and saw the order home again, tattered and ragged but intact and alive to fight another day._

I won't leave you, _she had promised that fateful day. _I will never leave you. _And she never had, until that morning in Sola Mira, when you ordered her to stay behind and intercept any returning familiars. She stayed behind, and he never came out of the hive._

_And she has never forgiven you._

_You doubt it would be any consolation to her, but you've never forgiven yourself, either. He was your first casualty, and you staggered back to base camp with his last, panicky grasp still tingling in your disbelieving fingertips and his pleading scream still ringing in your ears. Khara and Chin and Dougal offered absolution, insisted that it wasn't your fault, but you knew better, and you couldn't shake the memory of his terror-stricken face as he was yanked from your failing grip and dragged into the eternal darkness of the tunnels._

_You did not know how to tell her that her lifelong brother and cherished helpmeet was never coming home, and so you became the priests you hated and delivered the news with cruel, clipped brevity, the ruthless, wrenching snap of setting bone and severing limbs. You braced yourself for the paroxysmic outpouring of hysterical, inconsolable grief, for the sobs and the shrill denials and the fruitless attempts to rush to the hive and rob Death of a victory already won, but it never came. Instead, she was quiet for so long that you began to wonder if she had heard you at all. She had merely blinked at you in logy incomprehension for a moment, and then her knees had unhinged and she'd sat down hard upon the sand, her hands fisted in the fabric of her robes. She'd twisted the fabric in her fingers and given it a series of furious, spasmodic tugs. Her breaths had come in great shuddering, strangled gasps, but she had never cried out. She had simply sat upon the baking desert sand and rocked back and forth in slow, dreamy, strokes, her hands bunching and flexing in the fabric of robes become mourning clothes._

I'm sorry, _you wanted to tell her, but the words were lodged behind the hot stone of your own grief, and so you took refuge in the ritual of prayers for the dead. You reached for your rosary and recited the twenty-third Psalm into your folded hands and tried to pretend you couldn't feel the hot, sticky slither of his hand as it slipped through your fingers. The others duly bowed their heads and lifted their voices in solemn supplication, but she merely sat rocking in the sand, her golden plait hanging over one shoulder like the tail of a hangman's noose._

_It was Chin, God rest his soul, who got her on her feet. He proffered his hand as she sat with head bowed and hands kneading ceaselessly at the fabric of her cassock. You weren't sure she would accept it, but she did. She stood, swaying drunkenly as she clutched his hand, and when she finally raised her head, you were surprised to see no tears. Her cheeks were dry as crumbling stone and pale as exposed bone, pinched and hollow, as though a fleshless hand had scraped flesh from bone and left age in its place. The eyes that met yours were bleak and far too old, and she moved with the graceless hesitancy of a crone thrice her age._

_No one spoke during the long, somber journey home, and she fell far behind, stooped and shuffling through the sand with her gaze fixed upon the earth. Sometimes she disappeared from view, but she always reappeared, an indistinct, grey dot against the pale blue sky. You listened for the sound of muffled weeping, but there was only the mournful hiss of sand in the wind. Now and then, a voice rose in prayer, but it was never hers, and the rattle of Khara's rosary beads was too loud in your ears, the clitter of loose pebbles raining down upon a body sprawled and savaged in the bowels of the earth. It soured the spittle in your mouth and brought greasy bile to your throat, and you wanted to snap at her to stop, but you could find no cause to issue the order, and so you gritted your teeth and distracted yourself from the hot throb of guilt lodged in the center of your chest like a heated blade by reciting Hail Marys under your breath and crossing yourself in an endless, lulling rhythm._

_The remembered warmth of his hand still burned in your fingertips when next you saw her, willing herself up the corridor that led to the barracks' sleeping hall step by faltering step. There was nothing of the crone in her eyes then. She was a child again, eight years old and wailing ceaselessly against the injustices of the Church. Her face was bloodless as parchment and soaked with tears, and her eyes held such misery that you wanted to recoil. The apology bubbled to your lips again, dust and iron in the back of your throat, but to utter it would be to admit your failing and the weakness of your hands, and so you swallowed it like a corrupted Communion wafer and swept past her to seek what refuge you could in the tiny cloister just off the bathroom. You left her to her private agony and locked the door behind you, and when you were sure that there was none to hear, you fell to your knees and begged God and Johannes for forgiveness until your lungs burned and your parched tongue cramped and cried out for water._

_The Lord offered neither counsel nor absolution, and you had no choice but to set aside your grief and resume the burdensome mantle of leadership, but the clutch of his fingers and the bite of his nails as they sank into your flesh never left you, and you could not bear to see the grief that settled into her eyes like festering illness, and so you avoided her and spoke but brusquely to her if you spoke at all. You assigned her to barracks duty or simple reconnaissance and foraging missions or the occasional lesser hunts, and if circumstance demanded that she come along, you posted her at the base camp and spent your shame and impotent fury on the vampires foolhardy enough to cross your path. _

_Khara mistakes your aloofness for callous indifference, and far better for you than she should know the truth. It's not anger or apathy that moves your hand, but pity and endless, gnawing grief. You look at her and see her as she was, eight years old and stealthy as a dormouse as she crept beneath the circling shadows of her overseers and tried to stanch myriad and terrible wounds with the fumbling brush of small, pink fingers over chafed and tortured flesh. You see flecks of gold shimmering in the moonlight that spills through the small, grated sleeping-hall windows and a small head resting companionably against a stiff, bony shoulder until it relaxed. You see a tiger cub thrashing against a priestess' unyielding hand and screaming for the lash to be stilled before it lands another stinging blow. You see a young girl of fourteen strolling past a cell and raising her voice in assurance disguised as prayer, offering a morsel of hope to the soul trapped inside. You see a young priestess of eighteen, eyes fixed on his inscrutable profile as a Holy Father tattoos a cross into her forehead and marks her as forever untouchable, forever claimed by another. You see that same young priestess leaning forward to hear the secret her brother would impart, strands of golden hair spilling from behind her hood. You see the warmth in her eyes and the mischievous curl of her lips._

_But most of all you see your brother's hand-the same hand that would slither from your grasp like the twitching tail of an escaping serpent and damn him to perdition-brushing fine, golden hairs from her temple while she slept and lingering there, gentle as breath against her skin. The simple glory of love in a single, fleeting touch. You saw, and you knew how much she had lost-how much they both had-and you would ask no more of her in the name of a world that had given her so little. So you assigned her to as many menial tasks as you could in the hope of sparing her further bloodshed. A meager recompense, to be sure, but it is all that you can offer._

_As for her, she gives less than a good goddamn for your motives, no matter how lofty or sentimental. She knows only that her stalwart brother is gone, left to return to the vampire-fouled dust of a godforsaken cave, and that he who let him die endures to insult her with tedium and exclusion. She has withdrawn from you more with each passing day, become an island unto herself. She obeys because she must, and she fights from old habit and without passion. She no longer dances across the sky with the ethereal, lissome grace of the blessed borne upon the winds by God's angels. Now each movement is a wearisome toil, and her eyes are hard as flint inside her face. All that was good in her died with him, and now she only waits to join him in the afterlife._

_And oh, if she only knew what waits for her there._

"Could you do it?" he asks gruffly. "If I had been me who'd been dragged into Hell and turned into an abomination, could you kill me if she told you what I had become?"

Khara is silent for a long moment. Three beads slip through her fingers before she replies. "Yes. I would do it to ease your suffering." She scans the horizon and the buttes and outcroppings that rise in the hazy distance.

He grunts in response. He's not surprised by her answer; it is the answer she is expected to give as a good priestess. He does, however, doubt, the truth behind it. Of course she means it now, with no imminent threat before them and the knowledge that there can never be anything between them a bitter poultice against her heart, but he knows from hard experience that what one intends behind the clean and hardy ramparts of one's mind often vanishes in the face of reality. Once upon a time, he'd thought he could kill Lucy if she'd been turned, could snap her neck or slit her throat and send her to God with a pious and loving hand, but then he'd held her in his arms beside the twisted wreckage of uprooted rail lines and a derailed train, the fabric of her homespun dress sliding beneath his petting hands as he'd cradled her, and he'd known it for so much self-righteous bravado. When she'd opened her eyes at his tentative touch, he had seen nothing but Shannon in her frightened gaze, and he could no more have killed her than he could have reached inside his chest and torn out his own heart. Khara's love for him was not so great, but love it was, and he suspects that when push came to shove, it would stay her righteous, delivering hand.

"Well, I doubt she could," he says, and casts a furtive glance behind him to mark her sluggish progress at the rear of the straggling line.

His sotto voce pronouncement does little to assuage her consternation. Indeed, it only inflames it.

"Then why in the name God did you bring her?" she hisses disbelievingly, arms flapping stiffly at her side as she marches. "You can't possibly think she won't recognize him. She's not blind."

"No," he agrees, and resists the impulse to look over his shoulder again. "I told you, we can't afford to spare her."

Khara utters a mirthless bark of laughter. "And what will you do if she takes one look and decides to join him?"

"We'll just have to trust in her faith," he answers.

"Then we're screwed," Khara says flatly, and he can't help a flare of affection for her headstrong forthrightness.

"If you cannot trust in her, then trust in me," he says quietly. It's as close to a plea as he can come.

She narrows her eyes. "You have a plan," she says shrewdly.

He gives no answer. Instead, he reaches for the metal canteen at his belt and says, "Keep an eye on the others. At this rate, we won't reach Sola Mira until late afternoon."

"That gives him an advantage."

"Mmm. A big one. I'd push them harder, but they look like they're about to collapse as it is."

"Maybe we should wait, set up camp and attack in the morning."

"We do that, we run the risk of being spotted, giving him a chance to prepare." He unscrews the cap on his canteen and takes a measured swallow of warm water. It tastes of aluminum and earth, and he grimaces as he replaces the cap.

"We don't, and we run the risk of being slaughtered to a man," she points out.

_At this point, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other,_ he thinks, but he merely squints against the sun and says, "It's in God's hands now." He spares another glance at the line of acolytes who march doggedly behind him, and then he turns to Khara and gives her an imperceptible nod. She returns it, curiosity smoldering in her inquisitive gaze, but he does not, dares not, satisfy it. He tugs upon his hood to draw it more tightly around his face, and then he slows his pace and lets the sucking sand pull him to the end of the line.

_One foot in front of the other,_ she thinks, and watches the points of her toes as they dart in and out of her field of vision. _One, one, one, one._ Left, right, left, right, left... It's hypnotic, and it distracts her from the dry, smothering heat that draws the air from her lungs and rests against her skin like a thin layer of gauze. It also keeps her gaze focused on anything but the awful familiarity of her surroundings. Her throat is tight and dry as shale, and she should take water, but to drink would be to raise her head and see the craggy promontory of Sola Mira, its stony, crumbling spires stretching to the heavens like decaying claws, the hand of an impudent demon reaching to part the veil of Glory. If she looks she will, stop, will simply sink to her knees and breathe the last of her moisture into the arid, greedy sand, and so she leaves the canteen in her belt and counts the dust-coated flashes of her booted toes as they flicker on the periphery of her vision.

_Won't be much of an end if you die out here like some wandering jackal,_ murmurs the unsentimental voice of self-preservation inside her head, and her lips twist into a listless grin.

Better that than to return to the cursed earth of Sola Mira. She had thought-prayed-that she had left it far behind, forever banished to the realm of fitful dreams and nightmares from which she awakens with a scream on her tightly-sealed lips and sickly sweat clammy on her feverish skin. Now her feet draw her nearer with every measured stride. She can feel its infernal presence just beyond the concealing cowl of her cassock, light, skittering fingers at her nape and dry, fever-blistered lips pressed to her crown in an obscene parody of benediction. The brush of a phantom shoulder against her own makes her chest ache, and she cocks her head and spits sour saliva onto the cracked hardpan.

_It's not him,_ she reminds herself. _It can't be. Not now, not ever again._

_No,_ agrees a sly, needling voice, the surreptitious whisper of sand on smooth stone. _But you're going to see him, aren't you?_

Memories gather just beyond her field of vision, stultifying as the heat that scalds her flesh despite the fabric of her robes. She closes her eyes to blot them out, but they only grow sharper, and the fingers at her nape sink between the vertebrae like fangs. The voices of Dougal and Chin at her back as they engage in an amiable conspiracy of friendship. A joke, she thinks, and not one of which the Church Fathers would approve. Low and comfortable, the idle, easy chatter of boyhood delayed. Sanchez ahead, cowl bunched at his nape like a wattle of loose flesh and sweat stippled in his coarse, close-cropped hair in a sparkling diadem. Sage and cinnamon drifts back on the capricious breeze as it rises and falls and tugs playfully at the fabric of their cassocks. _Ollie-ollie oxen free! I'm the wind, and you won't catch me! _The bump and jostle of a shoulder against her own, and the brief, sinuous twine of work-roughened fingers through her own, a rosary of flesh and bone and hard calluses, and more prized than the ones Monsignor Orelas had hung around her neck at ordination.

_Those beloved fingers are so many scattered bones at the bottom of a cave by now,_ the sibilant voice of the desert whispers with gleeful malice, and an image arises in her mind of a vampire slurping the marrow from the denuded digit and sucking the joint like a delicate sweetmeat, eyeless face turned to the moonlight as it hunkers over a bundle of bloody rags.

Her head swims, and she opens her eyes and turns them toward the sun that its rays might burn the gruesome thought from her mind. _Have mercy,_ she spits at a complacent Almighty upon His throne. _Have mercy, my heavenly Father, and strike the sight from my eyes and the mind from my skull, that I may be tormented no more._

But the Almighty sits unmoved in His firmament, and His glory is cold and unyielding. Reason endures, and so does her sight, and so she drops her gaze and allows it to rest for a moment on the distant darkness of Priest and Priestess as they walk at the head of the line.

_There something afoot, and make no mistake,_ grunts Johannes, irascible and morbid, and she sees him in her mind's eye, straight and unsmiling and studying his erstwhile brothers with dark, shuttered eyes, his rosary wrapped around his fingers like a studded brass knuckle. His jaw twitches in dour contemplation.

_Yes, my brother, he is,_ she agrees, and old grief clots in her constricted throat like bile she cannot expel. Her fingers twitch with the desire to trace the hard line of muscle bunched beneath his cassock like corded steel.

That he is up to something is beyond doubt. He and his faithful fetch had distanced themselves from her almost at once, and on the rare occasion that she has peered from beneath her hood, she has seen him casting furtive, appraising glances at her, as though he expects her to forsake her oaths and flee into the desert, shedding her robes as she went.

_Perhaps they're discussing my disturbing lack of faith,_ she muses as she watches Priestess stamp along beside him like an angry magpie, arms flapping indignantly.

And why shouldn't they? Most of her faith had died here on the desert sand, seeped into the baking earth beneath her ass while she rocked to and fro and looked anywhere but at the ragged emptiness where he should have been.

In truth, she isn't sure why Priest brought her here. Sola Mira had been her last mission beyond the walls. After that, he had kept her near to home, and she had been glad of it. When the orders had been disbanded, she had been content to minister to the poor where she found them and sling substandard hash in a Church-sponsored almshouse. She likely would have done it until she collapsed into the watery stew and powdered potatoes if the orders hadn't been reinstated. She had obeyed the summons only because honor demanded it, and she had been surprised when Priest, who had shown no great affection for her since that day in the shadeless shadow of the hive, had asked for her assignment to his command. Habit and familiarity, she had thought it, an old soldier moved by conscience to protect his own. Now...she wonders.

It doesn't matter. She will go where he leads. It is all she knows, all she has left. Her rosary beads rattle like loose bones against her canteen, and she drops her gaze to the points of her toes and follows them across the miles. _One, one, one, one... Left, right, left, right, left... _And with every endless, burning mile, the unseen, fleshless fingers at her nape sink ever deeper into her flesh.

She's startled from her meditative reverie by the sudden appearance of a canteen beneath her nose.

"Drink," Priest commands. When she makes no move to take it, he waggles it insistently at her. "Drink."

She accepts the outthrust canteen and unscrews the cap to take an obliging gulp. Wet sand rimes the opening and coats her tongue like ash, but she cannot deny a shiver of relish as the water wets her tongue. She allows herself another swallow and replaces the cap. "My thanks, brother." She returns the canteen to his waiting grasp.

He promptly returns it to its place on his belt. "There's prudence, and then there's stupidity. I've never known you to confuse the two."

"I've never worried for your opinion of me," she retorts. "Besides-" She shrugs. "-I was...preoccupied. This journey has stirred memories."

For a time, neither of them speaks. She listens to the crunch of sand underfoot and the soughing of the breeze through the fabric of their robes. "I have memories, too," he admits at last.

She supposes he does. She does not care to hear them. "I wanted to go back for him. I had this idea that I could give him a proper burial. He deserved that much after all that I had promised him." A mirthless huff of laughter. "I made it as far as the front door, and my legs wouldn't go any farther. I kept trying, kept ordering them to move, once more unto the breach, men, but they just wouldn't. I kept seeing him-kept seeing too much. So I just stood there, clutching the doorknob like a drunk. I don't know how long it took me to go back to bed. I couldn't have found him anyway, not in those tunnels, not in the dark. That's what I tell myself. It's not like the vampires would've left him in his robes for me to find, a gift box from your friendly neighborhood soulless abomination, and one bone is the same as the next. They don't look different because God loves you."

"Sister-" Pained, stricken, and when she chances a sidelong glance from beneath her hood, the fine lines and creases beneath his lovely blue eyes stand in stark relief against his wan skin.

"I was a coward," she says, hard and unforgiving as the lash. "I just didn't want to see what they left of him. I didn't want that image to find its way into my dreams."

"Sister." Pleading now.

Another shrug, the swift, lethal descent of a hatchet. "Now I just wonder if he's burning in Hell."

"Sister!" It's a plaintive cry, and his grip on her forearm is the sudden bite of iron. "Sister, you mustn't think that. You mustn't blame yourself."

"No?" She gently twists her forearm from his grasp. "He was my friend, my sweetest brother, and yet the Church forbids me to grieve for him, to show weakness. I promised him I wouldn't leave him, and yet I left him to die alone in a hole. No comfort, no light, no still, small voice to bring him peace. What then should I do, my brother? Tell me, and I will do it."

"I don't know," he whispers. "But I do know that no good comes of dwelling on it. There's no way to know what became of his soul."

"Isn't there?" she says bitterly. "The Church teaches that those who are infected by the vampires become twisted mockeries of God's divine gift, neither human nor vampire, and it is absolute in its belief that what's left behind is utterly devoid of Grace and wholly undeserving of mercy. It is a damned creation that can only be cleansed by God's judgment, by the bite of silver or the heat of flame. Do you really think they took the time to burn him alive before they tore him apart? They aren't known for their mercy, especially not to priests. Do you know something I don't, brother?" she demands, her voice low and ragged and seething with anguish. "If you do, for God's sake tell me. Do you?" She regards him with dry, throbbing eyes that feel too big for their sockets. "Can you give me that mercy?"

He has the grace to meet her gaze when the answer comes. "No," he admits. "I can't." The regret in his eyes staggers her with its intensity, and she releases a shuddering breath and a shred of hope she hadn't known she was holding.

She swallows with a click, saliva gone to scree inside her mouth, and inclines her head. "I thought not," she says, and the words taste of blood. "That would be one miracle too many." Her mouth twitches in a convulsive grimace that threatens to part her lips and release a howl, and she abruptly turns the churning roil of her thoughts to the alien, limitless expanse of the desert beneath her feet and wills her mind to a careful, fragile blankness. "I am ever your tool, Priest, and my legs will follow where you lead, but I cannot speak for my heart."

He nods. "I wish I could, for what it's worth."

"I know. But..." She shrugs again. It's the only movement of which she is capable except for the rise and fall of her legs.

"I know," he echoes, and squeezes her shoulder. The uncharacteristic tenderness surprises her, as do his next words. "And I am sorry."

Then he's gone, returning to his place at the head of the march and the scrape and jostle of a loyal shoulder. Envy burns in her belly, corrosive and galling as alkaline water. She watches him through watering eyes until he is naught but a pinprick in the shimmering heat that rises from the hardpan like Hell's breath, and then she bends her head into the breeze and lets her dusty feet lead her toward the waiting shadow of Sola Mira.


	3. Journeys End In Lovers Meeting

To the human eye, the desert is a barren wasteland, a desolate moonscape of sand and of rock scoured smooth by the same. No animals scurry through the darkness, and the vast expanse is unbroken by so much as a single scrubby sagebrush. The stillness is absolute. Even the wind is absent, and nothing moves beneath the stars that burn, cold and bright, in the night sky.

But his eyes are not human, and he can see the life that skitters and pulses just beneath the surface. He can feel it, too, the minute vibrations of miniscule heartbeats burrowed snugly within the earth. Geckos that radiate febrile warmth like sauna stones. Sidewinders that coil in their lightless, airless holes and flicked forked tongues to taste the threat that crouches above. Mice who cower, whiskers twitching, oildrop eyes bright and glassy inside dismayed faces. Their hearts pound against tiny ribcages, a frenetic rhythm that dances along his sensitive skin like a caress. It's alluring and heady as wine, almost erotic in its sweetness, and he closes his eyes to savor it.

He knows how they would taste, those fluttering hearts. Their like had sustained him for the first bewildered days of his new life, when he'd had yet to shed the bothersome fetters of the old and the thought of killing had tortured his conscience. They had sustained him again when the meddlesome priest had nearly blown him to pieces and sent all the Queen's hard work to screaming, charred ruin. He'd slurped every drop of sustenance from them as he'd crawled across the desert with his flesh in flayed, smoking tatters and his scalp hanging over his face like a caul. He'd snatched and grubbed them from everything that had scuttled within his dying grasp, had swallowed them like cherry pits to soothe his aching belly. They'd given him the strength to drag himself back to the Queen, who had shown mercy to her unworthy servant and nursed him to health by the sweet nectar of her veins.

So choice, so delicate, ripened by fear until they became ambrosia and honeycomb on his tongue. Of course, bigger is better, and if he had his druthers, he would take the bounty offered by coyotes and jackals, whose hearts are thick and firm, apples that drip their crimson juice onto his greedy lips. But coyotes and jackals are kindred spirits of a kind, mercenaries and fellow predators, and they give him and his a wide berth when they scent him on the wind.

Human hearts are choicest and chiefest, rich and succulent and delicious as the finest Kobe beef. Some can be stringy, toughened by years of hard toil, but most are soft and fatty, unctuous and buttery and exquisite. A single human heart can nourish him for days, and he prizes them above all others. They are surprisingly rare, alas, treats he allows himself when his quarry is isolated and there is no one with whom he must share or from whom he must defend his kill, no wild-eyed yokel with terror in his eyes and a rusty pitchfork in his hands in need of correction as to his place in the natural order.

More often than not, he's forced to make do with the blood that courses through their veins, but this he counts as no great sacrifice. It varies in quality; once, he'd had the misfortune of imbibing the squirming, scrabbling offering of the local tosspot and spent the rest of the night and part of the next day trying to scrub the bitter, purulent taste of booze and piss from his teeth, but even that swill was a bounty gladly received. And when it's clean and pure...oh, it's sublime. As he'd once told a pale, pinched Lucy Pace as she'd clutched the arms of her chair and thought to open his throat with the nearby table knife, you'll never have better.

And there is no purer vintage than that of a priest. He never would have imagined it to be so, given how cruelly the Church drives them beneath its pious, goading lash. Indeed, given all that they are asked to endure in the name of cowardice and the overweening, authoritarian arrogance of the elders, he would have thought them all but inedible, gristle and sinew and sour pith. But it seems that a life of abstinence and unrelenting suffering was good for something after all, because he'd never tasted finer. He still remembers the warm, honeyed smoothness of it as it sluiced down his throat, cordial and mulled wine. More than he could hope to drink, and he'd glutted himself while the rest of the Queen's children had wiped the simpering, mewling inhabitants of Jericho from the face of the earth while their shabby pretensions to safety and civilization burned to ash around them. The hearts he'd kept, and though they had been on the chewy side, he'd never been more invigorated, and he'd felt a pang of true loss when he'd swallowed the last as bite of jerky a week later.

_Ask and ye shall receive,_ he muses wryly as he gazes down at the figures in the shallow arroyo from his vantage point on a small outcropping. Twenty, give or take a few, and three of them are priests. They're clustered around a trio of fires banked low. A few of them are awake and staring meditatively into the glowing embers, but most are huddled beneath patchwork bedrolls. He sees the glint of wary watchful eyes, voles peering fearfully from the illusory safety of their blankets. The rest are asleep, curled into balls as they dream, rosaries clutched in their fists.

He chuckles softly. _Didn't you tell them, Priest? _he wonders. _Didn't you warn them that those trinkets are useless? _Of course he didn't. Priest had never been a man of many words, and he'd been even more sparing with the truth. He'd never told those who followed him just how bad they worst could get when the light fled the sky and left them to the pitiless, silver glow of the moon. He'd certainly never told them what waited for them in the dark heart of Sola Mira. If he had, they might have refused the order, desires of the safely-cloistered Church Fathers be damned. That circumstances had worked to his advantage had been a matter of pure happenstance; had the Queen not been of a merciful mind and in the mood for a bit of fortuitous experimentation, he would be just another jumble of moldering bones crumbling beneath the effluvium of the hive.

If he had, _she_ would have ignored his order to remain behind like a puling child. She would have followed him. She would have held on until her fingers wrenched from the joints and her shoulder dislocated, and if he had slipped from her grasp, she would have tumbled down after him, Jill to his plummeting Jack. She would not have left him to face the darkness alone, deserted him to save herself, and perhaps he wouldn't be facing all the ages of the world alone.

_You hate him for that just as much as you do for him letting you go. He could have let her come, would have on any other raid, but that night, his strategy changed, and with it, the course of your life. He had lived his life, had known love and passion and all the attendant pleasures of desire. He had created the family denied you by the will of the Church, who cared nothing for your loneliness, or for the aspirations you had cherished before they came calling with their cassocks and their gilt-paged Bibles and their iron rods. They smothered those dreams beneath the suffocating mantle of higher duty and greater purpose, and then they bled you and broke your bones until they bent you to their self-serving whims and reshaped you into someone who bore no resemblance to whom you might have been._

_She could have given you that life. Before that night, you'd begun to see the faintest ray of light on the horizon. The number of vampires had begun to dwindle, and most of your ops were mop-ups. You'd begun to dream of life after the blood and horror of war. You wanted to ask her to come with you, to follow you as faithfully in civilian life as she had when you were scrabbling over ridges and descending blindly into caves with unseen bottoms. You had high hopes for the answer, and you allowed yourself to dream for the first time since your aborted boyhood. A quiet life of scholarship-a book-binder or a theologian. A wife with an occupation of her own. Children. A boy with sturdy legs and a girl with hair the color of summer sunshine and her mother's stubborn streak and sly, impish grin. A life of peace, if not plenty, and one made on your own terms._

_And then he lied and tore it all from you with the simmering, scalding friction of uncoupling hands._

_You thought of her often down there in the dark while the Queen's ravenous children sank their fangs into your flesh and lapped the blood from the cuts they scored in it with their clittering, diseased claws. You thought for a while that she would come for you once she realized that you hadn't come back with the others, and you listened for the sounds of her stealthy footfalls as she prowled through the tunnels on her nimble, feline feet to wrest you from their clammy clutches. But the only sounds were the drip of condensation from the dank cavern walls and the tenebrous, avian rustle of scaled feet as they clambered over the rocks and slithered into the surrounding crevices like burrowing parasites. _

_You called for her when you still had a voice, shrieked and sobbed her secret name when they sank their godless teeth into your belly and flicked their gelid tongues against your ribs. You were so sure that she would come, just as she had always done before, drawn by your keening entreaties and driven by a loyalty stronger than the bloodless, crushing grasp of the Church and the dubious sanctity of the chain of command, but no matter how urgently you called, fingers stretched tremulously toward the faint light at the entrance to the tunnel, the woman who had promised you as children that she would never leave you had not come. You had been abandoned for true and for the last time. You let your hand fall and stopped crying for her and for God and succumbed to the languid torpor of approaching death._

_The twilight between life and death was a peaceful haze, a lurid dream from which you had no desire to awaken. There was neither pain nor terror there, and you wandered through a patchwork of cherished memories and quietly-nurtured fantasies. You held your father's callused, work-roughened hand and smelled the sweat that beaded on his reddened nape and tasted your mother's bread, fresh and yeasty and full of oats and poppies. You smelled the water from the river, mud and reeds and bright spring grass, and felt the mud squelch between your bare toes. You scaled fish that glinted silver as they flopped on the riverbank and savored the earthy, flaky sweetness of them as you ate them from a tin plate. You saw your mother's smile again and the glossy darkness of her hair and felt her fingers as they carded through yours with wistful, maternal fondness._

_And you were with her, of course. You chased her along the riverbank while she laughed, head thrown back and golden hair flying behind her. You caught her and buried your nose in her hair and the sensitive crook of her neck, and she laughed when you drew your lips over the nautilus of her ear. You fed her the fish from your lines and your mother's bread, and she savored them both. You danced with her in the shade of a young oak and brushed the wedding rice from her hair with reverent fingertips and kissed her pliant, pink lips. You loved her beneath that same tree in the cool starlight, and in the autumn, while the leaves of the oak burned and fluttered to the earth like scarlet embers, her belly grew round and ripe and full of promise beneath her shift._

_You thought you saw her, a shadow looming above your unfocused eyes, and you would have reached for her if you'd had the strength, but the Queen's children had nearly sucked you dry, and you could only sprawl upon your stone tomb and swallow the bitter blackness that dripped down your slack throat. Immortality and salvation tasted of pitch and gall._

_You told the Queen of her once you had gained your strength and begun to master the limitless possibility of your reforged flesh. Nothing was hidden from her gaze, embedded as she was within your mind. Her voice was a constant whisper in your head, and unseen fingers deftly unraveled your mind and plumbed its secrets. She saw the glimmer of her in the deepest recess of your mind and plucked her from you like gold from bedrock. Bright as flame and diamond fire, and she held it before her pupiless, obsidian eyes in astonishment._

This is the greatest desire of your heart? _she mused, and turned it in a lazy, contemplative circle._

My only wish is to serve you, my Queen, _you answered meekly, ever the dutiful servant, though you served a new and more gracious master._

_She threw back her head and laughed, and it resounded inside your head like the tolling of a bell._ And yet you desire her?

Yes.

_She lowered her hand._ Not only obedient, but forthright, too. _The mingling of memory and wish lay in her palm like a strand of golden thread. _If you promise to serve me, my child, then you may have her. _She cupped your cheek with one three-fingered hand. _So much needless suffering, _she crooned. _Let your suffering be at an end. Find your love. Sow your seed and live the life our enemies have denied you. So long as she does not interfere with my plans, she will have a place in our new world.

_You wanted to find her right away, but the Queen, for all her compassion, had many tasks for you, and as days passed into weeks and then into months, the impulse faded. You were consumed with the business of faithful servitude, and there was little time to search for her. The cities were closed to you, well-protected by your former brethren, and the still small voice of the man you had been whispered with fervid insistence that it would be a search made in vain. She had not come when you had cried out in the frightened agonies of your rebirth, and only death could have kept her from you. She had perished long ago, a casualty of your brother's arrogance or incompetence. Or perhaps she lay at the entrance to the tunnels, skeletal hands stretched toward the tunnel that had served as your second womb. Either way, she was gone, and there was no use in seeking for her. Better to do the Queen's bidding and in so doing avenge yourself upon the man who had torn her from you._

_And then you met the ghost of your past on the road to Damascus, and all the buried memories rose to the surface. The cassock once as intimate as your own flesh, the cross whose faint outline was still etched into your forehead, the rosary that dangled from his fist like a hank of entrails-each of them stirred recollections of she who had once owned your heart. The aching longing for what could never be returned with a vengeance, blinding and consuming as the need for sustenance. You wanted to seize him by the throat and wring her whereabouts from him before you squeezed the life from him and left him to rot beneath the desert sun. An eye for an eye and a life for a life. Justice._

_But then that pining bitch who followed in his wake with dampened panties had wrenched a miracle from her miserly God and blown your carefully-laid plains to pieces. You were enveloped by fire and left for dead, and you were too weak and wracked by pain to look for her, Besides, as you lay in the cool, sheltering sanctuary of the hive with your blackened skin sloughing from your body in oozing patches, you told yourself that she would turn from you in horror, disgusted by what you had become._

Well, now the tide has turned. The mercy of the Queen has made him whole again, unblemished and strong, and Providence has led him here, to an isolated arroyo where his adversary and his fawning whore think to catch him unawares.

_Well, aren't they in for a surprise?_ he thinks as he watches his brother stare at a fellow priest sitting cross-legged beneath a small overhang, and smiles.

It's insulting, really, that they would think to come for him with this ragtag group of untested acolytes. Many of them are little more than children, scrawny boys with peachfuzz on their chins and girls barely grown into their bodies. Was he ever so young, so fragile? He must have been. The Church had swept him up as a child who still played with rust-spotted tin soldiers and wooden horses. But even the Church had never been so callous as to send him into the breach when he was still a child shivering in the throes of puberty and wrangling with the desires and urges the Church said he must suppress and forget as a devout child of God.

_Perhaps its circumstances are more dire than we thought,_ he muses with satisfaction. _I did send three of their best and brightest to Hell in Jericho, and now that I think on it, they did look a little worse for wear. They were sloppy, too. Chin practically showboated before I ripped his heart out. That's not something he ever would have done before. He was too careful, too disciplined. And yet, there he was, flourishing his blades like a child playing war with his friends. Maybe they're just tired of fighting, or maybe they've just gotten careless and complacent, sure that the threat is over._

There are the fires, too, bright as beacons in the darkness. A trained priest knows better than to allow fires in open country. The light attracts attention, and not just vampires. Coyotes and mongrel dogs, too. Yet here they sit, three dying fires throwing perversely cheerful light over the figures clustered around their dwindling warmth.

He clucks his tongue. "Obsession has made you careless, brother," he murmurs to himself.

_It could be a trap._

He rocks back on his heels, careful not to disturb the scree that litters his perch, and sinks even lower upon his haunches, his buttocks nearly scraping the ground. He turns his head a fraction and hisses through his teeth, one eye on the figures below.

A soldier scuttles forward with sinuous, reptilian grace, fingers splayed in the dry earth. _Yes?_ it asks inside his head, and cocks its eyeless face in wordless inquiry.

_Are you sure there are no others?_

_Yes. Just these._ It turns its flat nose to the sky and sniffs.

_Just to be sure, take a small squad and search the surrounding area for the next mile. I don't want any surprises._

It inclines its head in acknowledgment and turns upon its own stubbed tail to carry out his order. He watches until half a dozen forms vanish, rising over the rocks like smoke, and then he speaks to the others. _The rest of you fan out. Surround them. No exits, no chance for escape. Tonight, we feast on the blood of priests._

A jubilant howl rises in his head, and jubilation surges in his veins, dark and heady as lust. It is triumph and victory, and he exults in it, eyes closed and fangs glistening. _No more humiliation for us, brothers, no more shame. Tonight, we break them._

Another howl, and then they disperse, grains of sand scattered to the winds. He watches them until the last has disappeared even from his view, and then he returns his attention to the pitiful scattering of his would-be conquerors. More of them are sleeping now. Indeed, only the priests remain awake, and he can hardly call them vigilant. His former brother stands beside his faithful fetch, at half-hearted attention with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, but his eyes are not trained upward, scanning the ridge for signs of movement. Rather, they are fixed on the third priest, who still sits beneath the overhang, head turned toward the entrance to the hive.

_You seem preoccupied, brother,_ he notes as the seated figure rolls a strand of rosary beads in their palm. _If I didn't know better, I'd say you were worried. What is it that's gotten your attention, hmm? Are they weak, working wounded and nursing wounds beneath concealed bandages? Are they young, eighteen and with the ink of the cross still glistening wetly on their raw forehead? Are they unsuited, a subpar initiate into your dying brotherhood?_

He edges forward, the better to study the solitary figure. Their face is lost to the shadows and folds of their hood, but he can see that they're thin, almost scrawny. The robes hang slackly on their frame, and the cross of their rosary lies in the dirt, unheeded as they stare into the distance.

"Such irreverence," he tuts. _The holy standards are really slipping._

_It could be a woman,_ a voice suggests.

Oh, now _there_ was a delicious possibility. He'd never counted his fusty brother as a Lothario, but these are changing times, and a man has needs, no matter what the perpetual virgins of the Church say.

_Is that why you're staring with such intensity, my brother? Is there a woman beneath all that fabric who's finally turned the eyes of your heart in a way that the perpetual shadow at your feet never could? It would certainly explain why Priestess Khara looks so dour and harried despite her attempts at meditation. Jealousy is quite the distraction. Have you partaken, or does it remain a desire yet unfilled? It burns, doesn't it, to want what you can never have? It's a torment greater than death to be so close and yet forbidden to touch and taste and caress. I lived with it from the moment I came into manhood-years spent with my hunger burning in my bones like disease, my weakness pulsing against her sleeping flesh. I committed the sin of Onan behind rocks and in the barracks shower just to preserve meaningless vows penned by withered old men whose own passions had long since been satisfied. It is a death renewed with every agonizing breath, every incidental brush of a hand. It is Hell on this side of the firmament, and I hope it devours you._

"Sister," Priest calls softly, but the figure does not turn. In fact, it does not stir at all.

_Ah, so it is a woman._ He grins, lupine and predatory. It's a pity he won't be able to watch this little domestic drama play out. It would be an interesting diversion from the grinding gravity of the hunt.

The soldier materializes from the night, creeping soundlessly on its taloned feet, a submissive dog presenting itself for the approval of its master. _There are no others,_ it reports.

That's good. That's very good. _Are you in position?_ he calls to the others.

_Yes, _comes the chorusing, sibilant reply, the surreptitious murmur of the wind through the long-forgotten river grasses of his childhood home.

He dusts his palms on the knees of his jeans, and then he leaps to the arroyo floor.

Priest whirls in surprise, and his faithful fetch follows suit, unsheathing a long, silver blade.

"Hello, brother," he says as the others begin to stir, rubbing sleep from their eyes and scrambling to their feet. The nearest acolyte aims a blow at the side of his face, but it is easily avoided, and he grabs the offending fists and squeezes until the bones crack and grind. The boy-and he is a boy, no more than sixteen-screams and crumples, wounded hand cradled to his chest. "Children?" he sneers. "You think so little of me that you come after me with a band of children?" He steps on the whimpering child and grinds his booted heel into his ribs until he writhes. "Oh, you must be truly desperate."

A muscle twitches in Priest's jaw, and his eyes blaze inside his face, but he doesn't attack. He stands his ground, hands fisted at his sides. Priestess curls her lip and brandishes her sword, but she holds, a tiger coiling to spring.

"What are you waiting for?" He beckons them forward with both hands. "Come on, Priest. Finish what you started when I took Daddy's little girl."

Priest growls and tenses, but he doesn't advance. His eyes shift to the left and the Priestess beneath the overhang. She, too, has risen to her feet, but there is no fight in her, no sense of threat. She's staring at him from beneath her hood, swaying dreamily on unsteady legs. He can hear her breathing, rapid and ragged and pained, as though she were wracked with debilitating cramps. Her heartbeat is a frenetic, constant roll of thunder.

He laughs. "This is in whom you have placed your faith? I'm afraid you're going to be sorely disappointed." His amusement only deepens when she sinks to her knees and drops her rosary into the dust. She pitches forward, palms pressed into the dirt, and rests her forehead in the sand. He shakes his head. "Your great defender bows at my feet."

The priestess raises her head, and from the depths of her hood comes a name he had thought never to hear again. "Johannes?" Faint, a prayer whispered behind folded hands.

His heart seizes inside his chest, and his hand drifts out to brush the hood from her head. Golden hair and blue eyes, and suddenly, he's eight years old and staring into a tear-stained face while the priest at his bare back demonstrates God's love with every stroke of the lash.

Her mouth works, and she raises a dirty hand to skim the fingertips that still hover above her head. "H-,?"

"Let me guess: he told you I was dead."

A strangled, thwarted sob escapes her, and she nods. The tears, so familiar, stream down her face.

"Of course he did." He strokes her temple. _He's as hard as his masters. He let you suffer for all this time just to avoid the truth. My Liese, what have they done to you?_ She's far too thin, and almost feverish beneath his hand. "Did he tell you that he let me go? He could have saved me, could've brought me back to you, but he let me go to save himself. I was alive for days down there, weeks."

She keens and rocks back on her knees. She's panting with the effort of smothering her grief, but it's in every line of her face, and her heart is pounding so hard that she's vibrating with the force of it.

"Shhh," he soothes. "It's all right, Liese." He caresses her wet cheek. "It's all right. Come with me." He holds out his hand.

"Don't listen to him," Priestess urges.

"And why shouldn't she?" he asks. "I've already shown him for a liar. I'm not dead."

"You're an abomination," she snarls. To Liese, she says, "Sister, think. He's been turned, polluted by the vampire taint. Look at him."

Liese peers at him from her knees. Her eyes widen when she sees the white glint of his fangs and the amber of his eyes, but she doesn't recoil from his touch.

"I've changed," he admits. "But it's for the better. I'm faster now, stronger, and I recover from wounds that would kill an ordinary man. Priest here tried to blow me up, but after a few weeks, I was right as rain."

"And how much blood?" Priestess demands.

"A man does what he can to survive. Especially when his so-called friends abandon him to torment and death."

Liese utters another muffled cry.

He almost misses it. He's so focused on Priestess that he doesn't see Priest creeping in from the side, silver cross at the ready. But Liese does, and her expressive eyes give him a last-minute warning. He steps to the side and pivots, and Priest stumbles past, sharpened cross outthrust. He spins and regains his balance and prepares for another charge, but before he can close the distance, the vampires on the ridge descend in a shrieking tide.

Liese rolls and rises to her feet and withdraws a pair of silver scythes from a scabbard at her back. They glow in the moonlight, slender and lethal and lovely, and then she brings them down on the neck of an advancing vampire. Blood splashes to the thirsty earth in a gouting spray of obsidian, and the body collapses and twitches before dissolving into dust. She spins and impales another and twists the blade free with ruthless efficiency, and then she steps right and sweeps the other blade through the throat of a third.

"Liese, stop!" he commands, and she turns to him in confusion, but before she can either comply or defy him and seal her regrettable fate, a vampire launches itself at her and knocks her to the ground. One scythe flies from her grasp and spins beyond her reach, but the other remains in her grip, and she rolls through the attack and mounts the soldier, who squirms and bucks between her thighs. It's perversely erotic, and he watches, mesmerized, as she raises the blade like a shard of moonlight and drives it into its throat.

Then an acolyte is rushing him with upraised dagger, and he tears his gaze from the dark loveliness in front of him and devotes himself to the glorious harvest of blood. He recoils, a snake eluding the grasp of an impertinent hand, and spins to his adversary's flank, where he seizes a handful of dark hair and yanks until he's rewarded with the muffled crack of bone. He's met by a pair of glassy, brown eyes that roll in their sockets. "It's not what you thought it was, huh, kid?" he says, and plunges his fangs into his bobbing throat.

He groans in ecstasy as his prey thrashes and gurgles and the blood sluices over his tongue and down his throat in a hot freshet, sticky and sweet as mulled wine, He feeds until the flow slows to a sluggish trickle, and then he laps the last drops from the ragged wound. The body sags limply in his grip, so much worthless, infirm flesh, and he lets the husk drop. His soldiers will claim the rest. He licks his lips in satisfaction as he searches for his next victim. Not as fine a vintage as that of a priest, but invigorating nonetheless, and every acolyte killed is one less priest to oppose him later.

The battle is a blur of blood and bone. The ribs of a young acolyte disintegrate beneath a blow, and for just a moment before an overzealous soldier wrenches her from him and sinks its fangs into her throat, her heart flutters against his fingertips. He licks the blood from beneath his nails, frosting scraped from the bowl of a decadent torte, and steps on the throat of a fallen acolyte until it buckles.

_Disappointing, this crop, _he muses as he watches a young woman with dark hair fall beneath a swarm of soldiers. _We would've fared much better._

As though to prove his point, his former brother fells three soldiers with a spray of silver throwing crosses. Arms outstretched and feet tucked in a graceful crouch as he reaches for another. It's beautiful, a dance with which he is intimately familiar, and he's seized by a wave of wistful nostalgia.

_I loved you once,_ he thinks sadly. _We could have been brothers again if you had only taken my hand._

He applauds the display of fluid dexterity. "Well done, brother," he says, "But then, you were always good at this part of our holy calling."

Priest whirls to face him and hurls a cross at him. It misses him by scant inches, hissing past his cheek to embed itself into unseen flesh behind him. "Friend or foe, brother?" he goads.

Priest only snarls, face contorted by loathing.

He shakes his head. "Oh, brother," he says ruefully, "Are you still consumed by blind hatred?"

"You tried to kill my daughter!"

He grins. "Now, that's hardly fair. I had her on my train for nearly a week and never touched a hair on her sheltered, haughty little head. I could've killed her at any time, made her one of my pets. You mistake my motives. Maybe I just wanted the company of a pretty girl. A man gets lonely in the desert."

Priest lunges, lips peeled from his teeth in a savage snarl.

He retreats a pace, grinning. "Careful." He chuckles. "One of your ladies in waiting might mistake you for one of mine."

Priestess is over Priest's left flank, severing the head of a young soldier. Black blood and sweat fleck her face, and she looks inhuman in the moonlight. And Liese...

He laughs, a low rumble of genuine pleasure. Liese is dancing on the wind, scythe held aloft like a shining scepter. Her cassock billows around her, and her hair is a golden veil. She is a fragile goddess of silver and gold, and as her scythe descends to deal a killing blow, he loves her in spite of her sin, covets her with the ravenous want of a man too long denied.

_My Liese, _he thinks longingly. _My precious glory._

She catches sight of him as she drifts on the wind in defiance of gravity, borne up by the angels. Her lips curve in a fond, tremulous smile.

And then she plummets as a soldier vaults from the arroyo wall and crashes into her.

_No! _he screams as the soldier looms over her crumpled form and howls in triumph. _No! Not her! Leave her!_ he cries as he runs towards them, but the soldier is too far gone in its bloodlust to obey, and it pins her to the ground with one taloned claw. He wills her to move, to struggle, but she lies still as death upon the earth as the soldier lowers its dripping jaws.

He closes the distance with a flying leap and swats the soldier aside just as its fangs graze her throat. The bewildered soldier tumbles and rolls in the earth, long limbs flailing as it struggles to right itself. It shakes the cobwebs from its ringing skull and fixes him with an expression of wounded consternation.

_Not her, I said,_ he barks. _She's mine._

The soldier shies from him with a low whine, a dog scolded by an intemperate master, and skulks away. When it has rejoined the fray and diverted itself with a screaming acolyte clutching his exposed entrails in one bloody hand, he turns to Liese, who lies sprawled at his feet.

He drops to his knees beside her. _I can't lose her again, not when fate has given me this unexpected chance. _He brushes the hair from her face. This close, he can hear her heartbeat, slow and steady in his ears and along his skin, and he sags with relief.

She stirs at his touch and opens her eyes with an effort. "Johannes," she croaks, and winces at a sudden flare of pain.

"Ssh, I've got you," he murmurs. He's not sure how badly she's injured, but she's pale as milk, and he can smell bloody wool. It's rich and sweet and alluring, the promise of holy elixir, and he steels himself against the instinct to sink his fangs into her throat like an ardent lover.

_It's Liese,_ he reminds himself as the smell permeates his nostrils and tempts him to cruel hypocrisy. _It's my sweetest sister. I've waited so long for this._

_She left you to die, took your faithless brother at his word and never came back for you, _hisses the bitter voice of recrimination. _You cried out for her, and she never came._

She blinks at him. "Are you real?" she asks, and her breath hitches at another stab of pain. "If you're going to kill me, brother, do it quickly. I won't fight you. I'm too tired." Fingers that had once soothed the sting from chafed wrists curl around that same flesh, and his skin prickles in recognition.

That decides him. He gathers her in his arms, dismayed at her lightness and the boneless loll of her in his embrace, and carries her toward the ridge. He needs to take her home, to the seclusion of his cabin a few miles beyond the hive. There is food there, and shelter, and a place to assess her injuries and begin the work of turning her to his cause. A place to begin his courtship and indulge in baser pleasures of which he has dreamed since he slept with his prick tucked against the swell of her ass.

_It might be an easier matter than you think, _says the giddy and too-rarely-heard voice of optimism inside his head. _Her reaction when you dropped that little bombshell was priceless. She knows him for a liar and a traitor now. You can use that to your advantage, prod that wound until it weeps and cries for vengeance. It might take patience and time, but you have both in plenty, and if you succeed, the rewards will be beyond your wildest imaginings. One priest turned from the path nearly toppled the kingdom of mankind. Two would see it burn and dance among the ruins._

She stirs against him, whimpering softly. "I think I cracked a rib."

_You're lucky that's all you cracked as far as you fell._ "I don't mean to hurt you, sister, but it can't be helped. I don't have time for tenderness." _Much as I wish to display it._

He turns to survey his foes. Priestess is beset by two of his most zealous soldiers and has no chance to reach him before he gains the ridge and the winding path to the hive, but Priest is much closer and gaining quickly, cutting a jagged, bloody swathe through his troops.

_Concentrate on the Priest,_ he commands his soldiers. _Kill him if you can, but keep him out of my way until I reach the hive. Kill his bitch, too, if the opportunity presents itself, but if it doesn't, get clear as soon as you can. No use in taking unnecessary casualties. I don't need martyrs. I just need time._

There is an answering cry from his soldiers, an eerie, collective baying that silences all other sound. The priests, too, are momentarily stunned, frozen in postures of desperate fight. Priestess' mouth opens in dismay, and Priest blinks and shakes his head as though to clear it. Comprehension dawns, and he turns to pursue, but his soldiers are faithful, and they throw themselves into his path and cling to his arms and ankles. Still, the priest advances, wading through the clawing, tugging, screeching horde with grim determination.

"Good luck, brother," he calls jauntily, and then he takes a deep breath and leaps for the top of the ridge.

The subsequent landing jars Liese's abused ribs, and she groans in miserable protest.

"It's not far now," he soothes. "Just hold on, and I promise you, it's the last pain you'll ever know."

She chuckles, soft and exhausted. "I'm not that lucky," she mumbles, and turns her face into the pliant leather of his duster jacket with a shuddering snuffle.

His long, tireless strides eat up the distance and the desert sand, and it isn't long before he reaches the entrance to the hive. A pair of sentry drones greet him, noses pressed to the earth, and he acknowledges them with a flick of his eyes. He doesn't stop until he's inside and enveloped by the cool, damp shadows. Even if Priest were dogged enough to follow him here, he would get no further. The walls and ceiling are crawling with vampires. Not the teeming thousands that had dwelt here before the ill-fated assault on the city, but certainly enough to ensure that no priest would escape their wrath, and the hive guardian rumbles and shuffles in the subterranean deep, ever on guard against unwanted interlopers or unwary prey. It's young and unseasoned yet, but it carries the knowledge of its predecessor in its blood, and it will not hesitate to devour their enemies.

_It'll devour her if you're not careful, a hound swallowing a rawhide bone whole._

So will the others. They've caught her scent, tasted her blood on the air, and he can hear their growing excitement as they shift and scuttle along the walls, the agitated clicking of their jaws. Prey. Food. Offering.

"She's not to be touched," he says, and his proclamation echoes in the cavernous chamber. "Not until the Queen determines her fate."

"The queen?" she slurs. "Johannes?" She squirms in his arms with feeble, drugged alarm.

"Ssh," he says gently. "Peace, Liese." When she continues to struggle, he asks, "Do you trust me?"

She stills, breath harsh and thin in an effort to spare her ribs. "Yes," she says.

_She's either a fool or a goddess,_ muses a wry voice inside his head.

He ignores it, heart swollen with triumph and pride. _Still mine, then._

He sets her on her feet with assiduous care. She sways and staggers, hand pressed to her side, and he reaches out to steady her. The smell of blood is stronger now, redolent, and his stomach rumbles greedily.

"I can't carry you through the tunnels. They're too low."

She says nothing. Her gaze travels around the corridor with dreamy slowness, and she lists dangerously, one leg threatening to buckle entirely. "Sola Mira." She steadies herself for moment but begins to reel and wobble again almost at once. "Sola Mira," she repeats, and her voice cracks beneath the weight of old grief. "This is where they left you," she moans. Her chest begins to hitch, and her eyes are wet. "This is where they left you t-to t-" Her mouth works soundly.

"Liese," he barks, and squeezes her arm until she gasps. "Liese, we have to go. They know you're here, and I won't be able to stop them forever. Not when you're bleeding."

She gapes at him in logy incomprehension. "Mm?"

He seizes her by the hand and leads her down the narrow, winding tunnel through which he had come to salvation and revelation. She staggers after him, her breath coming in pained, ragged gasps. The scent of blood is closer here, a sweet torment, and he breathes through his mouth to blunt its pernicious edge.

"Take solace in your God if it will make it easier," he says as he stoops to pass through a particularly narrow section of tunnel. The top of his hat scrapes the ceiling, and dirt rains down upon him.

She says nothing, but she squeezes his hand in acknowledgment, and soon, her gait steadies and her breathing eases. He loosens his grip, but doesn't release it, and she threads her fingers through his in a gesture of unthinking affection that makes his throat burn. He's missed her, missed this, and he'd long since given up hope of finding such connection again. The vampires accepted him because the Queen demanded it and respected him for his skills, but they do not love him, and if he were to fall in service to their cause, they would not mourn him as anything other than a valuable asset lost. In that, at least, they and his former brotherhood are of a mind.

But Liese has always loved him, not because of his utility to the glorious cause of humanity, but simply because._. _She loves him because he is Johannes, a boy who should have grown up on the riverbank with mud cool and wet between his bare toes. She loves him because he likes the wind in his hair and the oily aroma of fresh fish on his hands. She loves him because he had defied their masters and remained steadfastly himself in the secret cloister of his heart even as he had paid superficial obeisance to their bloodless, crumbling doctrines of privation and lifelong loneliness. She loves him simply because he is, and that is a gift as precious as the immortality bestowed upon him by his gracious Queen.

_No more loneliness,_ he thinks. _No more nights alone, no more wandering in the wilderness._

_At least until age and the frailty of mortal flesh steal her from you._

They wouldn't. He would turn her, make her see. She would join him in the bliss of eternal life, and they would spend the ages of the world together, exalted among vampires and progenitors of a superior race that would go forth and multiply and hold dominion over the earth.

_And if you cannot convince her?_

Then he would compel her, force her lips to the font if he must. She would resist, and perhaps she would hate him for a time, as he had hated the brotherhood who had deserted him to his fate and the Queen who had remade him in her own sublime image, but it would be fleeting, the temperamental paroxysm of an adolescent clinging to the last vestiges of childhood. Once the sting of betrayal faded, she would come to appreciate his momentary tyranny. And he would have all of eternity to earn her pardon.

"Where are we going?" Clear and curious, though he can hear the pain just beneath the surface.

_The opiate of the masses did its job well,_ he notes with wry amusement. "Home."

"You don't live here?"

A soft huff. "No. I prefer the sun. I've lived too long in the dark." _And so have you._

"Is it safe to stop for a drink of water?"

"There's a place up ahead where we'll be able to stand," he answers, and presses on.

It's another half-mile before the passage opens into a small, snug cave festooned with lichen and mushrooms that sprout from the dank walls like tumors and shallow outcroppings that offer respite from the march. The path resumes on the other side, and he's tempted to renege on his unspoken promise and keep going, but her breathing has grown harsh again, and her fingers are slick with sweat, and so he draws to a stop and falls back to guide her to the sturdiest outcropping.

She collapses onto it, arm wrapped around her middle in a makeshift brace. Her other hand fumbles for the canteen at her belt. She's pale and pinched, and the hair at her temples is damp with sweat.

"You sure you've only got a cracked rib?" He presses the back of his hand to her forehead, but finds no fever.

"My side burns." She grimaces as she uncaps her canteen.

"Let me see."

"Let me wet my tongue first." She lifts the canteen to her lips and takes a long, convulsive swallow. He's transfixed by the greedy, peristaltic pull of her throat and keenly aware of her pulsepoint as it flutters in its sensitive hollow.

_Tart and sweet as pomegranate seeds_ he thinks, and the longing is a savage cramp in his gut. He tears his gaze from the tantalizing sight and fixes it on her knees.

She drains the canteen and gives it a forlorn shake. "Empty," she says ruefully, and lowers it to her lap.

"There'll be all the water you can drink once we get to the cabin."

"A cabin?" She titters.

He drops to his haunches in front of her and shifts over his toes. "Now, let me see."

His gently patting hands find a wet, sticky rent in the fabric of her cassock, and upon closer inspection, he discovers four jagged claw marks of equal length that run from just below her floating rib to behind her hip. He gingerly peels the tacky, sodden wool from the edges of the wounds, which gape and contract like toothless mouths with every breath. Not fatal, from the looks of them, but painful as hell, especially when compounded by the jostle and bulge of a cracked rib, and if he doesn't tend them soon, they'll be festering with infection.

_Just one taste,_ wheedles the voice of his hunger with the desperate, single-minded intensity of the addict. _She's too weak to stop you, and as long as you don't use your fangs, no harm will come to her. She will remain your Liese, young and lovely and headstrong. She can still be your helpmeet and eternal companion. Consider it the first act of your joyful union._

His lips are so close, a dizzying hairsbreadth from a nectar as divine as ambrosia and rose. All he has to do is part his lips and extend his tongue, and he will know God more intimately and completely than he ever had when he had bowed and scraped before His self-appointed prophets as a starving, frightened, loveless child in search of a family.

Fingers come to rest upon his nape, soft and cool, a wordless benediction. "I have missed you so, brother," she murmurs, and cards them through the hair at his nape.

He resists the urge to purr with the pleasure of it and bury his head in the folds of her cassock. Instead, he picks up her other hand and presses a kiss to the center of her palm. "Come on. It's not far now, and I can put out the fire in your side."

She rises with a grimace and totters for a moment as fatigue and vertigo threaten to overwhelm her, and then she follows him into the next labyrinthine tunnel, eyes half-lidded against the slaloming walls and seesawing ground. Down and down into the forgotten tombs of the desert, past the bones of beasts and kings of old whose legacies had been erased from memory. Now and then, she reaches out to steady herself against his back when the terrain threatens to upset her failing equilibrium, and his skin burns at her touch, holy water and frustrated desire.

Eventually, the slope begins to climb, and after a mile of treading the upward path, the claustrophobic darkness is pierced by shafts of muted, grey light that slant through the splintered slats of dilapidated, wooden boards. "We're here," he calls over his shoulder, and strides forward to pluck a solitary plank from its place near the outer wall and jam it through the widest gap in the center. He thrusts it upward and applies pressure until he's rewarded with the stolid thump of tumbling lumber.

He replaces the impromptu lever and pushes open the rough-hewn doors. The murky light of dawn oozes in, milk reflected in the polished gloss of a silver saucer. The moon hangs low and drowsy in the sky, and the horizon is pink with the first rosy blush of a new day. It's melancholy and ephemeral as the lace of a bride's veil, and he wishes he could capture it in his fist like a wisp of morning fog. He draws it into his lungs instead and holds it there until an agreeable ache blossoms in the center of his chest. Then he releases it on a slow exhale and steps out of the tunnel, Lazarus emerging from his sepulcher. Liese follows, squinting against the wan light.

"Home sweet home," he says, and urges her forward with a grandiloquent sweep of his arm.

She shuffles toward the small cabin ten yards distant. She's spent now, propelled by habit and bloody-mindedness, and even those will fail her soon. "You live here?" she says, and peers at it with tired, bloodshot eyes.

"I'm not home much," he admits as he sweeps her into his arms again. "But on the rare occasion that I am, this is where I hang my hat."

"Did you build it?" Her words are soft at the edges.

He chuckles. "You credit me too much. No, it was abandoned by the previous tenants." He sees no need to tell her that those tenants are so many jumbled bones in the compost heap, or that the teenage boy whose room she would be occupying had pissed his pants while his lifeblood had pumped into his mouth in spurting, obscene spurts. "Besides, you know I was always more a fisher of men than a carpenter," he teases, and she giggles deliriously.

He carries her across the pathetic scrap of yard and up the creaking steps in dire need of replacement. He shifts her in the cradle of his arms so that he can grip the tarnished brass doorknob, and when the tumbler releases, he nudges it wide with an impatient bump of his shoulder. Then he carries her across the threshold, a bridegroom with his beloved, and kicks the door shut behind him.

The noise brings a familiar from its room adjacent to the kitchen, a pallid creature with eyes the color of peat and teeth that smell of carrion and contagion. The former light up at the sight of the bundle in his arms, and it scampers forward with servile eagerness.

"A gift, master?" it simpers, and a mottled tongue emerges from between fleshless lips like a straining, necrotic prick.

"No," he snarls, and bares his fangs in feral warning.

It shrinks from him in terror. "Forgive me, master," it whines, and cowers. "I only thought-"

"You thought nothing," he snaps, and its pasty, hairless head bobs in hasty agreement. "She is not to be touched."

"As you say, master," it answers with fawning deference, and retreats a few paces to demonstrate its earnestness.

"Bring me any bandages we have and the needle and thread. And a basin of hot water, some cloths, and the medicinal brandy."

The hairless head bobs like a pulsating boil. "Yes, master, yes, yes," it chants.

He fixes it with a gelid, yellow gaze. "Don't make me wait."

"No, master, no," it assures him. It casts a final, longing glance at Liese and the golden fall of her hair, and then it turns and scuttles to the kitchen to gather the necessary supplies.

He carries her down a narrow corridor and into a tiny bedroom with a bed and a simple, three-drawer dresser. A stunted, three-legged stool squats at the foot of the bed, and a round endtable lurks behind the half-open door and hosts a washbasin and a thick, ceramic ewer. An empty closet gapes idiotically to the left of the dresser, and a single window in the wall opposite the door mars it like an unsightly afterthought.

He lies her upon the bed on her uninjured side and smooths the hair from her forehead. She's flagging badly now, desperate to slip into sleep, and yet she resists, blinking up at him with drooping eyelids.

"Sleep," he murmurs. "I'll take care of you."

"You always did."

The familiar creeps in, tray in hand. "As you requested, master," it announces.

"Leave it."

"Yes," it agrees, and sets the tray atop the dresser, but it doesn't depart. It merely stands there, wringing venous, emaciated hands and eyeing the blood seeping from Liese's wounds with ill-concealed hunger.

He turns with the speed of a striking rattlesnake and seizes it by the scrawny, fragile throat. It's light and inconsequential as dust in his grip, and he lifts its feet off the floor and squeezes until the cartilage and doughy flesh bulge between his fingers. "Does she please you?" he murmurs. Its feet pedal frantically in the air in search of purchase, and it looks at him with wide, terrified eyes. "I told you never to touch her," he purrs. "If you do, if you even think about it, I will unzip you from cock to sniveling face and paint these walls with your decaying guts. Do I make myself clear?"

It nods, and tears well in its eyes. The small capillaries have burst, and he watches its irises turn pink. "Y's, M'ster," it rasps hoarsely, vocal cords fluttering like a moth's wings against his palm.

"Have you ever known me to lie?" He tightens his grip.

It shakes his head.

He lets it go with a snort of contempt. "Get out."

It flees, whining piteously and clutching its bruised and rapidly-swelling throat. He watches until it calipers down the hall and around the corner, and then he closes and locks the door.

"Always so protective," Liese says sleepily from behind him.

He picks up the tray and carries it to her bedside. "Sleep, Liese," he says. "I told you'd I'd take care of you." He sets the tray on the floor and kneels beside it to peel the bloody tatters of wool from the wound again. "I need to take this off. Can you sit up?"

"You just told me to go to sleep," she points out, but she raises her hips and lets him tug her cassock over her hips to just beneath her breasts. He's surprised to find a thin, white slip of rough-spun cotton. It, too, is bloody and torn, and he raises it with ginger fingers to reveal drab, grey underclothes of the same material.

"You didn't think we went bare under there?" she asks, amused, and lets her hips sink to the mattress.

"I never thought about it." _When I thought of you, I thought of your naked flesh warm and yielding beneath my hands and mouth._ He picks up a cloth and dips it into the bowl of hot water. "This is going to sting," he warns, and begins to daub the oozing tears.

She flinches from the contact and hisses between clenched teeth, but settles quickly and endures his ministrations in stoic silence. After a few brushes of the cloth, she says, "Did you?"

"Did I what?" His attention remains on the task at hand.

"Go bare."

"Sister! If I didn't know better, I'd say you were entertaining lustful and licentious thoughts," he teases. "But no. It would've been uncomfortable and impractical in combat. It's hard to concentrate on the enemy when there's sand in the crack of your ass," he says drily.

She cackles at that, and he pauses in his work to wait out her fit of mirth. "I suppose it would be," she mutters.

When he's cleaned the wounds of sand and flecks of wool and cotton, he drops the soiled cloth and picks up the bottle of brandy. "This is going to burn like hell," he tells her, and before she can tense against the pain, he pours two fingers of the rich amber liquid over her injuries.

She's too disciplined to writhe, but her fingers claw into the mattress, and she clamps her lips shut against a shout. She goes limp with relief when the searing agony of purification by the unholy spirit begins to ebb.

"Here." He offers her the bottle. "Take a sip. It'll help with this next part."

She eyes the bottle with a mixture of longing and disgust. "You know I'm forbidden to take alcohol."

"You take Communion wine," he points out.

"It's been blessed by the Fathers and thereby cleansed of iniquitous impurities."

"'Iniquitous impurities,'" he snorts. "But if it will make you feel better." He sighs and performs the stations of the cross over the bottle. "Bless, O Lord, this drink which Thou hast created, that it may be a salutary remedy for all who partake of it, and grant that it may, by invoking Thy holy name, receive health for body and soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen."

She gazes at him in logy amazement. "Huh."

"What?"

"You didn't burst into flame for invoking the name of our Lord like the Church said you would."

"You'll find that they were wrong about a great many things." He holds out the bottle again. "Now drink."

She accepts it and takes a dainty, parsimonious swallow. "More," he orders, and she grudgingly complies.

He retrieves the bottle and uses its contents to sterilize the needle, and then he allows himself a long, delicious pull before he replaces the cap and sets it aside. "Don't move," he says, and begins the painstaking work of putting his precious Liese together again. "Sister Khara was always better at this," he muses as he works.

"It's because she was obsessive. You were always gentler."

"I suspect her hands gentled plenty when it came to him."

"You noticed, too?"

"Notice? It was hard to miss."

She hums in distant agreement.

She drifts after that, content to leave him to his work. Her body relaxes beneath his fingers as she succumbs to sleep, and he finds himself humming tunelessly as the needle pierces her skin and pulls the thin filaments of thread in its wake. He works with persnickety care, determined that the scars should be as inconspicuous as possible. She's too beautiful to be so marred, too fine a gift to the world to be so ill-used by it.

"No more scars," he murmurs. "No more blood spilled for an ungrateful world."

He sews the stitches as fine as he can make them, and when he has knotted the last, he surveys them with a critical eye. They're jagged and ugly against her smooth skin, an offense to the eye, but they're the best that he can do with the supplies at hand.

_Besides,_ he assures himself as he wipes his bloody fingers on a hank of cloth, _once she takes the blood of the Queen, all her old hurts will pass away, and she will be remade as she was meant to be, without flaw._

He dabs at the faint flecks of blood that cling to the skin around his careful work. _Just a taste, the voice of temptation urges. Just one._

He looks at her, sleeping so peacefully, so guileless and trusting and sure of his affection for her.

_Just lap that single drop from her skin. No fangs, no poisonous bite._

He dips his head and lets his dry lips skim the cool flesh. He can smell her, sweat and sand and the copper of blood, and he moans softly. So sweet, so good, everything that he had imagined when he'd stolen from an encampment to creep among the rocks and take himself in hand within their concealing shadows. He still remembers the patter of his seed upon the sands when the pleasure exceeded his burning shame and his hips rocked and jerked of their own accord. Inside his jeans, his cock stirs, and he resists the urge to palm himself through the stiff fabric. He's scant millimeters from the drop now. It's no bigger than a teardrop. All he has to do is open his mouth and flick the tip of his tongue, and he will know her more intimately than any mortal has ever known a woman.

She stirs beneath him, and a soft, low moan escapes her. It's too much, and he reels from her so quickly that he nearly falls on his ass. He scrambles to his feet and staggers toward the door, and then he's jerking the knob so hard that it comes off in his hand and splinters the jamb. He drops the disarticulated knob and lurches down the hall and into the bathroom two doors down. His cock is so much need and iron inside his jeans, and the brush of denim and cotton is an unendurable torment against hypersensitive flesh.

He frees himself from his clothes, and it's over in half a dozen frantic strokes of his hand. He buries his face in the crook of his arm and bites into his leather duster as he comes, and then he wavers over the toilet on knees that threaten to unhinge and waits for his pounding heart to slow.

_Soon,_ he thinks as he gropes blindly for the flush handle. _Soon it won't be your hand there. It'll be hers. Or her mouth. Or her cunt. All that's needed now is patience._

"Johannes?" The plaintive call of a child who's awoken in the night to find herself alone. "Johannes, where are you? Johannes?" Shrill and laced with burgeoning panic.

He straightens and hurriedly stuffs himself into his clothes, and then he scurries back to the bedroom to find a disoriented Liese wiping sleep from her eyes and struggling to get up. She looks up at the sound of his footfalls, and the relief on her face makes his jaw ache.

"I thought you were a dream," she says miserably. "I've dreamed of this so many times, only to wake and find it was just another of God's jests."

"I'm not a dream," he assures, and closes the now knobless door behind him.

She holds out her arms. "Then come, brother," she implores him. "Please, I can't. I can't...not again." Her chest hitches.

He needs no more invitation. He sheds his boots and pants where he stands and drops his hat onto the dresser, and then he climbs onto the bed beside her and gathers her to him, careful not to jar her ribs. There is no Church to demand they remain separate, and so he tucks her against him and entangles their limbs. "I'm here, sister," he whispers into her ear, and presses a kiss to the thin flesh behind it. "I'm right here." He rocks her gently and buries his face in her hair.

"If this is a dream, then I do not wish to wake."

"It's not a dream, I promise. I'll be here when you wake."

"Please don't go, Johannes."

"I won't. "Now, ssssh. Sleep," he mouths into her hair.

He rocks her until she goes limp in his embrace and begins to snore softly, and only then does he allow himself to feel the weariness of the day's toil. _Mine,_ he thinks as the sun ascends and his eyelids grow heavy. _Mine at last._

And for the first time since he was pulled from the light of the world and plunged into the cold, smothering dark of Sola Mira, he feels alive.


	4. Sister Mine, I Have Brought You Home

The ache of her cracked rib and the pinch and nettle of the stitches in her side pull her from sleep. She lies beneath the thin, white coverlet and blinks at the far wall until her eyes adjust. The light that spills from the lone window is wan and rosy. Dusk, she supposes, or a little after. She holds her breath and rolls to her back, and her hand gropes blindly for the tangle of her brother's limbs or the lean warmth of his belly, but she finds only disheveled sheets, cool to the touch. The disappointment drives the breath from her, and her chest hitches convulsively.

_Just another dream,_ she thinks miserably, and she curls in on herself despite the agonizing protest from her wounded side. _I thought he was here. I could feel him, smell him. He whispered my name like he used to and tended my wounds. He held me while I slept._ She raises her hands before her face as though to search him out upon her skin, but she smells only sour sweat.

_Not fair! _her mind screams, and she swallows an anguished cry.

She has dreamed of him before, but never so vividly. In the days and months following his death, she had found him in her dreams almost every night, walking over the desert sands in his cassock and bidding her follow him as his rosary glistened in the moonlight. She found him in the barracks, sitting cross-legged on the end of his cot with his Bible open on his lap and a mischievous smirk playing on his lips. _Hello, sister. Planning new rebellions in your heart?_ She found him on her forays through the city, a flickering shadow at her shoulder as she wrested necessities from the miserly grasps of the shopkeepers. She found him at her back in her cot in the barracks, weight and wool and plosive breaths against the shell of her ear. She had woken from these dreams with her heart in her throat and her face wet with tears, fingers clawed in her bed linen or tangled in her rosary. But for all the grief and terrible longing they had brought her, they had been mercifully remote, visions glimpsed in an icy mirror.

But this one...oh, this one. He had been so solid beneath her hands, so clear to her disbelieving eyes. His fingers had moved over her flesh, and his voice had rumbled in her ears, that rough baritone that she had loved so well, and that had raised gooseflesh on her arms whenever he'd whispered into her ear. Her name had poured from his tongue like sweet wine, and he had enfolded her in a protective embrace. He had crooned into her ear and promised to be here when she awoke.

And yet, the bed is empty.

Perhaps this is the wages of sin, punishment from God for the weakness in her heart. Because the Johannes of her dreams had been right for all his impish teasing. She _had_ been planning rebellions in her heart. She served the Church because she had known no better path, had been offered to them like sacrificial chattel by parents cowed by its power and in need of one less mouth to feed, but as she had grown into the stripling gangle of her limbs, she had begun to imagine other paths. She had pictured a life beyond the grey, loveless cloister of the barracks, a life of freedom and gaiety and limitless opportunity. Much of it had been the stuff of childish, naive optimism, unattainable in a world razed and rendered sterile by nuclear bombs dropped thirty years before she was born, but there had been one constant. No matter the shape of her dreams, Johannes had always featured as the treasured centerpiece. When she was small, she had envisioned as an eternal playmate, someone with whom to scramble over the walls of the city and frolic among the dunes of the desert, but as knobs and hard, spare angles had softened into pliant flesh and feminine curves and the older sisters and unsmiling Priestesses had handed her sanitary pads and lectured her on the licentious temptations of the sinful flesh, he had transformed into something forbidden that had kindled a feverish ache between her legs.

Fifteen years old and stealing furtive glances at him during catechism class, mouth dry and skin curiously hot as she watched the thin line of his mouth and wondered what his pale lips would feel like on hers or on the line of her jaw or the pale, sensitive flesh of her throat. Sitting at the long, low trestle table that served as the dining hall and watching him peel an orange with nails worried to the quick. Feeling her heart flutter when he offered her the first section. Standing at attention in the training yard and watching those same hands snap a length of wood with a single blow. Watching the muscles of his back flex and ripple as he grappled with the priests and the older acolytes, teeth bared in a feral snarl while the blood oozed from his nose onto his lips. Sneaking into the cell where he hung suspended by his arms and legs, back bowed and head lolling, and running a scrap of damp cloth over his welted, bruised flesh. Flushing when his eyes fluttered open to gaze at her with unsettling awareness. The shameful frisson of unnamed want that danced along her spine when he spat blood upon the floor of his cell and begged her for even a drop of water in a raw rasp that inspired both anger and solicitous pity. Pressing the cloth to his lips and trying to ignore the unseemly tightening of her belly as he sucked as much moisture as he could from the fabric.

Sixteen and keenly aware of his gaze upon her as she tried to perform her daily meditations. Equally aware of the deepening of his voice and the broadening of his chest. Her name had taken a different resonance in his mouth, had been laced with plea and promise. Entangling her fingers with his for the briefest instant under the pretense of handing him his rosary or his Bible. Exchanging knowing, fond smiles as they passed in the corridor or knelt in the chapel, hands folded in pious prayer while their minds traveled less righteous roads. Watching him wash his hair with the water from a ewer, dry-mouthed and light-headed as it beaded in the ends of his lush, dark hair and cascaded over his sun-reddened shoulders. Standing in the shower later that night with her nipples hard as pebbles beneath the lukewarm spray and fighting the urge to rut against her fingers.

Seventeen and accompanying a priestess on a shopping trip in the heart of the city. Slipping through the milling throngs with the nimbleness of a minnow. No weapons then, just her rosary around her neck and a vial of holy water in her pockets. Getting separated in the peristaltic crush of the midday crowd and rounding the corner to see a woman kneeling in the alley with her dress hiked over her undulating hips and her mouth around a man's swollen prick. Standing transfixed as her head bobbed in languorous counterpoint to the man's thrusting hips. His head had lolled against the grimy facade of the building, and the woman's hand had snaked between her thighs. She'd gaped in frozen fascination until the priestess had seized her by the sleeve of her robe and dragged her away, hissing Scripture and condemnation in her ear. Standing at the whipping post, the leather of the bindings biting into her wrists, and bucking beneath the stroke of the lash. Her hair in her face and the silence of the room as the others watched. Knowing he was there, watching the whip caress her exposed flesh. The simmering welter of the stripes as she lay on her cot. Falling asleep and dreaming of the couple in the alley. Of the man's rocking hips and guttural moans and the sublime expression on their faces. The Church said that fornication was a sin, a vice worthy of damnation, but there had been no shame in their expressions, no fear of Divine wrath, only blissful ecstasy. Just before she had awoken with a slick dampness between her thighs, it hadn't been the strange man with his mouth in a boneless gape and his hips rolling into the woman's sucking mouth, but Johannes, grunting and thrusting. And when his hand had come to rest atop her head, she realized it was her kneeling between his legs, fingers working furiously between her legs.

Seventeen and kneeling before the altar in the barracks chapel, hands folded and eyes closed against the memory of an iniquitous dream, the heavy, wooden cross as discomfiting as the gaze of her confessor. Hearing footsteps behind her, and knowing, even before she raised her head and turned to look, who it was. The smell of him as he knelt beside her and folded his hands and the rattle of his rosary beads as they slipped through his fingers. His strong fingers curling around her wrist for a fleeting instant, touch in defiance of the sanctity of prayer. Her name whispered in her ear, a prayer not meant for Him. The frisson of want as he stroked her cheek before rising and leaving the way he had come.

Eighteen and standing in a small, isolated corner of the ordination hall, raw weeping crosses pressed together as their foreheads touched. His fingers entangled with hers and his breath on her cheek and nose. So solid and strong, and so very near in the undisturbed stillness. Her body had sung with desire, taut and restless and desperate to press itself against him, to feel the deceptive power hidden beneath the folds of his robes. The breathless scrape of feet as she yielded to temptation and stepped into his embrace. The needy, possessive rake of his fingers through her hair, and the raggedness of his breathing as she pressed her palm to his chest to feel the thunder of his heartbeat.

_Liese. My Liese._ So much need. So much said in so little.

And she had been his. Then, before, and ever after. She would have kissed him then, if a shadow had not swept across the wall in the familiar billow of a priest's robes, would have risen on her toes and sought his lips and run her fingers through his hair. But the shadow had fallen over them like the disapproving eye of God, and so they had parted in haste, smoothing their robes and muttering meaningless abjurations to godliness. They had not looked at one another again until they were safely in the company of others of stronger conviction, and then they been models of propriety, chaste and proper and aloof. That night in the barracks, she'd curled upon her cot and moaned into the pillow with the force of her stymied arousal, thighs trembling and slick and coarse panties sticking to her hypersensitive cunt. But she had not succumbed to the failing of her flesh. She had fisted her hands and rocked to and fro until exhaustion took her, and in the morning, she'd knelt in the chapel, the pitted stone hard against her bare knees, and flogged herself until her back sizzled with the sting and prick of untold needles.

Nineteen and twenty and twenty-one and unable to sever the bond between them or smother the ache in her heart and between her legs. Following him on hunts and thrumming with the impulse to touch him, to come up behind him, press her nose to his nape, and simply breathe him in while the sand filled her hair like wedding rice. Sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark and turning to press a quick, blind kiss to his shoulder. The answering caress of his fingers on her ankle. Lying on the desert hardpan with him at her back and fighting not to turn into his protective embrace and awaken him with hot, open-mouthed kisses that would transform his fraternal agape into a feverish, carnal entanglement of sweating, writhing limbs. Feeling the urgent hardness tucked against the swell of her rump and wishing she could rock against it. Lying on the hardpan with him at her back and seeing the couple from the alley, the snap and roll of his hips and the bob of her head as she sucked him into her slurping, puckered mouth. Staring at the endless expanse of sand and rocky outcroppings and wishing she could know something so sweet, could see his face so contorted with pleasure and unencumbered by care. Wishing she could know his heat and quench her insatiable curiosity.

Twenty-two and twenty-three and holding to her vows of chastity by the slenderest of threads. Praying for the strength to endure and terrified that it would not be enough. Sure that if she betrayed her vow and slipped into the night to take him between her thighs, God's grace would bleed from her as surely as the blood from her surrendered maidenhead and the seed from his sated lust and render her useless to the brotherhood and forever tainted, a child of Cain with no place to call home. Petrified that he would share her fate and despise her for it, would shun her for bringing him low. Plagued by visions of leading the order to unwitting slaughter because she no longer stood in God's favor and was become a liability.

Twenty-four and taunted by the specter of hope. The queens had begun to fall in greater numbers, and the vampire population had been in precipitous decline. Attacks on the cities were rarer and rarer and murmurs rippled through the orders that the end was near. Brothers and sisters still trained and meditated and prayed, still bent the knee to the Almighty, but there was also talk of life after the war. Talk of farms and trades joined theological debates at the table. Some talked of venturing beyond the city walls to see what remained of God's good earth. Even Johannes had begun to talk of the future. Publicly, he spoke of a sojourn in Vienna and study in their rumored theological libraries. Privately, he spoke of looking for his parents and finding the river in which he'd once fished as a boy. And all of it had carried an unspoken invitation.

Twenty-five and squatting in the dark outside of Sola Mira, shoulder to shoulder and gazing up at the tall, craggy spire. Hearing his breath and the scrape of sand beneath his shoes as he shifted position. Reaching out to take his hand, shielded from prying eyes by the rock behind which they sheltered. His gentle answering squeeze. Knowing that she would go with him if he asked, would follow him from the dead sands to the river valley of his childhood. She would find a vocation to busy her hands and gladden her heart, and she would keep his house. She would take him if he came to her, would ease the eternal hunger that had ignited in her bones all those years ago, when she had wondered what it would be like to taste of him, and if God willed it, she would bear his children, no longer a chaste sister of his heart, but his beloved wife.

She had almost offered herself to him then, almost raised his hand to her lips and bid him come with her into the warren of jumbled stones that surrounded their encampment, but she hadn't dared. They'd been so close, so close to the end of the war and their obligation to the Church, and if she faltered now, at the eleventh hour and sent him to his death for a moment of fumbling passion, there could be no forgiveness. So she had foreborne. She would wait until the fight was done, would go to him once they were back in the barracks. Perhaps to the training yard, where they would lay their burden down beneath the twinkling gaze of heaven and pledge themselves to one another with every delirious, unpracticed jerk and roll of her hips. Perhaps in the tiny bathroom, clawing at the stucco with wet fingers as they bodies succumbed to primal instinct. Perhaps in the stinking isolation of the cells where an angry boy had been reforged into a relentless warrior. Or perhaps in the chapel in an act of rebellion against the whipping post and the impassive gaze of the Lord who had demanded of them flesh and blood and had denied them even the meanest of comforts.

Except he had never returned to the barracks, and her grudging purity had remained intact.

_I should have done it,_ she thinks as she tenses against the tenderness in her side and sits up. _If I had, I could've taken meager solace in the memory of his hands and his mouth and the fire in his eyes. Instead, I wonder what might have been and conjure phantoms and abominations in my mind._

_If you had, you might've ended up with your purity on the sand and his bastard get in your belly. That would've been just your luck given the previous track of your life. You would've been a fallen woman with a fatherless child in your belly. The brothers and sisters of your order might have pitied you, have done their best to offer your shelter and solace in deference to all the trials you had shared, but the Church would never have countenanced your sin, not when the proof of it grew with each passing day and made a mockery of their vaunted claims to piety. You would've been excommunicated and expelled from the barracks, a brazen fornicator and traitor to your sacred oath. There would have been no charity for you, not from the Church Fathers who had once called you daughter, and not from the public, who would shun you as a craven slattern and a selfish, flawed tool who had shirked her holy duty for a moment of base pleasure. You would have been a penniless pariah, and if you had not died of starvation or miscarried in some filthy alley because of malnutrition, you would have delivered his issue in some tarpaper hovel while rain leaked through the roof and some gnarled, hunch-backed crone squatted between your legs._

_I was alive down there for days, weeks._ That's what he'd said, the Johannes of her bittersweet dream. Maybe that was his punishment for the sin of desire, to die a slow, excruciating, lonely death at the hands of his enemies because he had loved her. And maybe this was hers, to wander in a hell of waking dreams until the end of her days, longing for what might have been in a kinder world.

"Is this your punishment, Almighty father?" she croaks to the golden light of the room, her voice rough with sleep and bitterness. "Is this my penance for loving him more than I ever loved You, for fighting for him instead of You?"

_You should hardly be surprised at his vindictive pettiness, child,_ whispers a bilious, sneering voice inside her head. _If you want to know his mind, you need only look at the conduct of his servants. After all, as they so often reminded you, they were made in His image._

_If this is a dream, then who cleaned and dressed your wounds? Those are real enough._ They twinge and throb as though to emphasize the point, and she throws back the covers and swings her legs over the side of the bed.

The others, like as not, Priest or Khara or even one of the acolytes.

_If they patched you up, then what are you doing here?_ the voice persists. _This certainly isn't the barracks._

From what she remembers as she rises gingerly to her feet with a hand pressed to her injured rib, the fighting had been hot and heavy. There had been dozens of vampires, perhaps as many as fifty, and the casualties had been high. Maybe Priest had decided to fall back to a more defensible position until the vampires broke off the assault and they could flee to the sanctuary of the city walls with their dead and wounded in tow and their tails tucked between their legs.

And there had been so many dead. That she remembers with painful clarity as she hobbles toward the door. They never should have gone to meet the devil armed with nothing but crumbling convictions and a gaggle of half-trained children. It had been hubris and folly, and they had paid for it in blood. Not theirs, though. The price was seldom exacted from those who deserved it. It was the children and the widows and the soldiers who suffered.

_It's hardly the first time Priest has been guilty of such recklessness. He never should have led you into Sola Mira, and he never should have insisted that you stay behind like some absurd doorman, idling at camp while your brothers died and they dragged Johannes down screaming into the dark, but he did, and you have suffered for it every day since._

It would be convenient to lay the blame for this latest debacle at his feet alone, perversely gratifying, but in truth, they are all to blame. She had known his plan for suicide the moment she heard it, and so had Khara, but they had gone along with it anyway, Khara for love and she for weary indifference. She had been too tired to fight, too eager to meet her own death and find release in its embrace, and so she had meekly offered up half a dozen souls for slaughter. If she would not burn for her unchaste love for her sweetest brother, then surely she would burn for that. They all would. Only Mariel had been strong enough to see the truth and speak it clearly, and only she would be held blameless on the day of judgment.

_The old woman deserves an apology, _she thinks as she gropes groggily for the doorknob. _I'll have to bring it to her on penitent knees._

And then she stops. Her hands find no knob to grasp, and her gummy eyes register only a ragged hole and a splintered jamb. She surveys it in mute consternation for a moment, and then she turns and scans the room. No doorknob, but there is a bottle of brandy on the floor and a bowl of bloody water. She wrinkles her nose at the latter and turns to face the door again.

_He gave me the brandy before he started stitching, made me drink it to numb the pain. Poured it into the cuts, too. Burned like hell._ Her skin simmers and prickles with the memory, and unseen fingers move over her flesh with delicate care. His voice in her ear, low and sultry, smoke and longing and the promise of a kiss, and her chest cramps with ancient grief. _Where are you? _she thinks, and whines helplessly. _If this is real, then where are you? You promised you'd be here when I woke up._ He'd shed his boots and pants and hat before he'd crawled into bed and cradled her to him, but there are neither boots nor crumpled jeans on the floor, and there is no hat on the dresser.

_Maybe he put them back on,_ suggests the voice of reason.

Or maybe they'd never been there at all. Maybe he'd been nothing but a hallucination conjured by her mind in the thick of the fighting, a figment of her imagination born of guilt and loneliness and her unspoken wish for death. She'd long hoped that he would come for her in the end, when either time or the crushing, rending fangs of the vampire caught up with her, would open his arms and usher her from this world with a smile and a gentle murmur. She would go before God on his arm, and perhaps the Lord would be more merciful in his judgment than the Church Fathers had been in theirs.

_Then how do you explain the differences in him? The yellow eyes and the glint of fangs behind his upper lip?_

Perhaps death had transformed him, mortal flesh exchanged for the celestial bodies they had been promised by the Word of the Lord.

_So God gave him the likeness of a vampire, His sworn enemy, as recompense for his loyal service and selfless sacrifice?_ says a decidedly skeptical voice.

_Maybe you're dead,_ offers the listless, matter-of-fact voice of pragmatism. _Maybe you saw him because that vampire knocked you out of the sky and tore your throat out. Maybe it wasn't him who carried you here, but Priest with another body on his conscience, or an acolyte. Maybe they tried to patch you up but couldn't, and you bled to death in that hard spinster's bed. Or maybe you never made it off the sand. Maybe you're still lying out there with all the rest, the ones who never wanted to die, calling to the blowflies and the jackals with the stink of your rot and turning to leather in the sun. Maybe this is your judgment. Maybe God, in His mercy, decided that this is to be your eternity, a hell of rough-hewn wood and creaking floorboards and wounds that never heal, of a loneliness that never fades. Maybe you'll walk here forever, always seeing Johannes from the corner of your eye and never quite reaching him no matter how fast you run or how far you reach, Tantalus straining in vain, not for a peach or a single drop of water, but for the merest brush of a cherished hand._

_Maybe you'll open the door and find the devil waiting for you on the other side._

There is nothing on the other side of the door but an empty hallway. And the missing doorknob, which lies just beyond the threshold. She nudges it aside with her toes and shuffles from the room to investigate the others that line the hall. The first is a tiny, windowless room crammed with miscellaneous bric-a-brac-a spindle-legged chair, an old sewing machine stacked atop a basket bulging with scraps of fabric, a kerosene lamp, old family photographs in tarnished frames, a wooden cradle tucked improbably in the far corner. She ponders it with idle curiosity for a moment, drawn to its pathos as it peers from behind the chair legs like a forgotten pup, and then she forsakes it and peeks into the next door, which proves to be a bathroom.

Her bladder cries out in needy recognition at the sight of the toilet, and she hobbles inside and closes the door behind her. It's a full two minutes before she can convince her battered rib to let her squat on the cool, porcelain oval, and she heaves a sigh of relief as the heaviness in her bladder recedes in a tinkling splash. "Thank you, Father," she murmurs as her body does its ignominious work.

She sits there with the fabric of her robes bunched in her hands and assesses the situation. Now that wakefulness has come, she can smell herself, sour and stale and coppery, sweat and old blood. She inspects her robes and groans at the blood-encrusted tears she discovers. The blood can be removed, perhaps, if she soaks it in cold water and scrubs it in borax soap, but there's no guarantee she'll find any here, and in any case, the tears make it a moot point. She could sew them shut, but they would be ugly and puckered and prone to further damage. A single loose thread could provide purchase for a vampire's killing claws. They're ruined, good for nothing but dusting rags for the chapel.

_That assumes you'll ever see the chapel again. You're probably dead, remember?_

Her wounded side throbs in vociferous counterpoint to this logic, and she eyes the tiny bathtub opposite her with a mixture of trepidation and longing. It's been days since she bathed, and her dry, gritty skin thirsts for moisture and a prolonged soak, but her mind balks at raising her leg high enough to step into the tub when the motion promises a bolt of exquisite pain. Still, the prospect of warm water makes her skin itch with anticipation. She has endured the agonies of training and battle and the privations of the march. Surely she can grit her teeth long enough to get into the tub.

She rises from the toilet and carefully pulls her robes over her head. She's dismayed to see that her shift, too, is in bloody tatters over her hip. She had hoped to salvage it, at least until she could cobble together another cassock or find a reasonable substitute, but it looks like she'll have to do without. The cassock will have to remain in service until she can stitch something together from the scraps in the other room.

_I'll be the priestess of many colors,_ she muses as she curls her fingers around the ragged hem of her shift and prepares to tug it over her head.

A gentle rap upon the door. "Sister, is that you?"

She's so startled that she reels on her feet and nearly collapses onto the toilet, whose bowl protrudes from beneath the tank like the pooched lip of a toddler in tantrum. Her hand shoots out to clutch wildly at the sink, and there she stands, ass in the air and hand locked spasmodically around the edge of the sink, when the door opens to reveal Johannes.

"Are you all right?" he asks, and steps into the room to take her by the shoulders.

She can only gape at him, chest seized in a cramp that drives the breath from her lungs and crushes the words in her throat. He's dressed just as he was last night, in boots and jeans and a leather duster. She remembers the cool softness of that duster as he'd carried her across the desert and left the others far behind in a roil of blood and dust. _You're real. You're here._ Her hand comes up to cup his face, and she feels stubble like the grit of sand against her palm.

He turns his face into her touch and nuzzles her fingers. "Why do you look so surprised? I told you I would be here when you woke."

"But you weren't. I was alone. You're not real. You cannot be real."

"And why not?" He raises his head but tangles his fingers with hers.

"You're dead. You died in Sola Mira. You never came back. You never..." Her throat burns, acid and lye, and a terrible cramp masses in her chest, squeezing her heart in a pitiless fist. She will not, must not. It is an act as forbidden to her as the desire that had once driven her to audacious dreams of a sweeter life beyond the snaring, strangling reach of the Church. Those who had died in the service of the Lord were martyrs to be praised and gloried, not mourned. She would not take from him what little the Church had given. "Besides, you've got stubble."

It's a ridiculous straw at which to grasp. She's seen him scruffy and unshaven a thousand times on hunts, when toiletries were a frivolity best left behind in favor of an extra knife or more throwing crosses, but it's all she can think as she wrestles with an anguish sunk so deeply into her bones that it will never come out and blinks up at golden eyes that hold a terrible familiarity despite their strangeness.

"A problem easily remedied," he assures her, eyes dancing with amusement, and pulls her against him in a snug embrace. "I would peel the very flesh from my bones if it would convince you that I am alive."

And he does feel so alive as she rests in his arms. He smells of cinnamon and sage, and his heartbeat is strong and steady beneath her palm. She closes her eyes, and for a moment, she's eighteen again, with the proof of her oath etched into her forehead and her blood mingling with his as they stand with their heads pressed together in that isolated corner of the ordination hall. The war looms before them, and death, and so much sorrow, but for now they are young and whole and bright with hope and vigor and unsullied righteousness. There is still time for all the dreams that they nurture in the secret cloisters of their hearts, still reason to believe in happily ever after. She is his, and he is hers, even if they cannot say it, cannot take that sacred oath before God and the taciturn Church Fathers. If she raises her gaze now, she will find lovely dark eyes and thin lips rosy with the promise of a kiss, but when she looks up, she sees eyes the color of summer honey, and she remembers.

_Desires such as these are what killed him, what led you to this path of perdition,_ scolds the voice of her confessor, hard and unstinting as the stone floor of the chapel on which she has so often knelt.

She stiffens as disentangles herself. "Thank you, brother. I'm fine. I was just considering a bath."

He blinks at her. "You can have one, but I must warn you that there is no hot water. I can have the familiar heat some on the stove if you like. It might take a while if you insist on the tub, but you could always go the campfire route," he suggests, referring to the haphazard sponge baths to which they had often resorted on a hunt, when they'd crouched behind rocks and sloughed the dirt from their skin with rags wet with water from their canteens. "I could be of help if you need it."

"No," she snaps, and he recoils from her unexpected vehemence. "No," she repeats, ashamed. "It's all right, brother. I would not entice you to impure thoughts."

He purses his lips as though to speak, but then thinks better of it. "Water for the tub, then?"

"No. I'll clean up in my room."

"Fine. I'll see if I can find a change of clothes. Just leave your robes outside the door."

"Thank you."

"Anything for you, sister," he says quietly, and her heart aches at the tenderness in it.

She waits until the door closes behind him and his footsteps recede down the hall, and when she's sure he isn't lurking outside the door, she slips from the room and goes back to her bedroom to await the arrival of his familiar.

While his Liese conducts her ablutions in the small bedroom, he devotes himself to the task of finding clothes for her. The lady of the house has been dead for nearly a year, and in truth, not much remains of the life she'd once lived here. He'd had most of her belongings carted out and burned. The familiars had looted the rest, he supposes, sold the jewelry for what coin flaking gold plating and tarnished silver could fetch. There are a handful of things crammed into the unadorned little room beside the bathroom, but he doesn't recall seeing any clothes in there. Just old photographs and swatches of fabric in patterns suited to small children and over-rouged matrons. Still, there might be something in the wardrobe in his bedroom, a dress or a nightgown with which to preserve her modesty.

Not that he wants to preserve it, mind. If he had his druthers, he'd strip her bare and lay her upon his bed and feast upon her, partake of all the delights he has so long been denied, but she's clearly not ready to indulge his hunger. She's too peaked and frail, a pallid, tottering wisp in her robes. She's underfed, and even after a long, unbroken sleep nestled in the safety of his arms, there are deep, worrying shadows beneath her eyes, bruises left by a cruel hand. Last night as she'd slept, he'd surreptitiously raised her robes to examine her in the moonlight. Lean and spare and hard, she'd been, all sinew and pith, a weapon worn to the nub by the rigors of war with nothing of youth's vigor in her. No soft, ripe sweetness, only muscle and bone and milky skin.

_And still, you wanted to touch her. You wanted to caress her thighs, to feel the silk of them beneath your fingertips. You wanted to pull down her ragged, grey undershorts and see her cunt, to run your fingers through the coarse curls and slip them between her folds. You wanted her to grow wet and swollen beneath your sly, fumbling ministrations, to moan and whimper and buck while your fingers worked her slick, heated flesh. You wanted her to open her legs in mute, needy invitation, and you wanted to lower your head and lap at her forbidden sweetness until she rose and shuddered, keening and digging her nails into your shoulders._

He growls helplessly as the images dance across his mind with painful clarity and send blood into his restless cock. Of course he did. He's wanted that, wanted her, since his pubescent cock had first stirred between his legs at twelve. He hadn't had a name for it then, hadn't understood why the sight of her had stirred a low-banked fire in his belly that had turned his balls to lead and sent curls of lazy smoke through his veins. Understanding had come a few years later, when he was fifteen and hard as birchbark inside his robes as he'd hung from the ropes inside his cell and she'd drawn a cloth over his grimy, tortured flesh. Along the inside of his welted legs like a lascivious tongue and across his belly, and oh, God, how he'd wanted her hand to drift to his crotch, where his cock stood to attention against his belly, but it never had. She'd been too oblivious or too pious, and he'd been too weak from the Church's discipline to shift his hips into her path.

The picture had grown clearer when he was sixteen and Priest had taken him on a patrol. The supervising priest had broken off to explore the perimeter, and he and Priest had stumbled across a brothel whose upstairs windows were open. Priest, ever the obedient acolyte, had quickly averted his gaze, but he had stared in astonishment, suddenly too hot inside his skin. He doesn't remember much about what he'd seen before Priest had tugged him away, hissing admonitions in his burning ear-certainly not the faces of the couple in the window-but he's never forgotten the sinuous writhe of their joined bodies atop the bedclothes, the raw, sweaty undulation of them. Nor has he forgotten the bob and sway of the woman's breasts as the man rode her from behind.

He'd expected Priest to turn him in for his act of voyeurism, but he never had. Perhaps he'd been moved by a rare paroxysm of mercy for the brother so often flayed bloody by their superiors in an act of morbid public spectacle. Whatever his motives, his brother had kept his secret, and he had kept the recollection of what he'd seen, had turned it over in his mind like an illicit worrystone while he lay upon his cot and savored the feverish lust it had inspired. Sometimes he'd palmed himself beneath the coverlet, breath coming in plosive, furtive gasps as his ears strained for the sound of approaching footsteps. More often than not, he'd carried it with him into the shower, where he'd taken himself into his soap-slick hand and imagined that it was the eager, sucking tightness between Liese's legs. Then he'd come so hard that his knees threatened to buckle and cry out into the muffling crook of his elbow, and when the evidence of his misdeed had washed down the drain, he'd staggered out and wrapped himself in his acolyte's robes and prayed no one would notice the trembling of his knees or the pounding of his heart.

Each time, he'd been overcome by shame and sworn on his knees before God that he would never do it again, never dishonor his sweetest sister with such prurient fantasies, but then he would see her as they studied the Word of the Lord at evening vespers, her head bent to her Bible and her lustrous, golden hair peeking from beneath her hood. Rosy lips and delicate lashes and skin smooth as cream, and all his promises would be forgotten. He would watch her, dry-mouthed and wanting, and when the night drew down and the priests left them to their devices, he would retrieve the memory from its secret place and let its sordid pleasures wash over him, silk and honey against his flesh.

And always, it was his Liese whom he saw in the darkness behind his eyelids.

When he was seventeen, he'd stood to rigid attention with the other acolytes in the chapel and watched as the Father tore the cassock from her back and flogged her for the sin of licentiousness. She, too, it seemed, had witnessed something not meant for godly eyes and would made made to pay the price in blood and pain. He'd been riveted by the unblemished paleness of her back as she set her feet and braced for the first strike of the knotted lash, and he'd been mortified by the ugly thrill of arousal that had gripped him when he'd realized he could see the swell of her breasts in profile as her torn cassock had hung from her arms. She'd cried out behind clenched teeth when the lash struck home, and the sudden, breathless exhalation had conjured images of bodies joined and writing atop the bedsheets, of sweat stippled on rippling bodies. Her body had jerked with each application of God's judgment, and the sway of her breasts as she'd arched had mesmerized him and wrapped lascivious fingers around his cock as it strained against the fabric of his underclothes. He'd been appalled, had thought himself a monster as it had throbbed and twitched in time to the fall of the lash and the sinuous, helpless arch of her spine, but he hadn't been able to stop, to turn his dizzying lust into anger at the Father who would punish her for the unfortunate happenstance of sight and the Church who condoned such cruelty from the safety of the ivory tower. He could only watch and sink deeper into the fantasy that had unspooled itself in his mind, and when the last lash had fallen and the Father had loosened her bonds, he hadn't been able to face her as she'd staggered past with blood oozing down her back and her cassock clutched to her chest like a suckling child.

Nor could he go to her that night as she lay whimpering softly on her cot, curled on her side to spare her inflamed back. His heart had insisted he ought, but he'd been paralyzed by the memory of her swaying breasts and breathless cries, and he'd been embarrassed and convinced that she would sense the black, immoral treachery of his heart beneath his brotherly solicitude. So he'd turned from her muffled, sporadic sniffling and closed his eyes against the need to slip his hand into his pants and spill into his pumping fist. When he'd awoken to the gong for morning vespers, her cot had been empty, and his underclothes had been tacky with dried seed. He'd fled to the shower with burning cheeks and wept while he scrubbed the proof of his sin from his belly, thighs, and flaccid cock.

When he'd scoured himself raw as penance for his selfish faithlessness, he'd crept into the chapel and watched her as she'd bent to her prayers, stiff with the lingering pain of her punishment. When the presiding Father had bent to read from the liturgy, she had turned to offer him a pinched, tired smile. Guilt had swollen within his chest like a bubo, and he'd dropped his gaze and studied the rough grain of the wooden pew in front of him. He hadn't looked at her again until they'd sat to breakfast in the dining hall. She'd slumped heavily at the table and picked listlessly at her bread and cheese, sickly and silent, and he'd thought she was going to be sick, that perhaps the wounds had festered in spite of the priestess' application of salt. He'd shifted uneasily upon the bench and nudged his cup of water in her direction.

_Drink, sister,_ he'd urged. _You'll heal faster if you keep up your strength._

She'd hesitated a moment, and then her fingers had curled around the cup and drawn it to her. _Gratitude for your charity, brother,_ she'd murmured, and taken an appreciative swallow.

He'd given a single terse nod of acknowledgment and returned his attention to his plate. His conscience had been hot with guilt as he'd surreptitiously watched her nibble her bread. They had tortured his Liese for the spiteful, perverse sport of it, and he had taken pleasure from her humiliation and agony. He'd wanted to caress her cheek and plead for her forgiveness, but to do so would have been to invite further undeserved punishment upon her innocent head, and so he'd simply offered her the rest of his food and left the hall with his heart in his throat. He'd provoked a fight with the Father during catechism class, and he'd been savagely glad when the old man had whipped him into semi-consciousness and ordered him to two days in the cells. It had been the least he'd deserved for his obscene passions.

And yet, when Liese had sneaked into the cells in the dead watches of the night to croon comforting babble into his ears and sponge the blood from his back, his belly had tightened, and his cracked lips had puckered and twitched with the impulse to turn and kiss her.

_Take strength in the Lord, brother,_ she'd whispered as she'd bathed his welts with cool water. _He loves you, and so do I._ She'd stroked his face and pressed a kiss to his temple before she'd left, and the euphoria provoked by her touch had temporarily overwhelmed the fire in his flayed back and the high, sharp throb in his straining joints. He'd never wanted it to end, and he'd cried out in forlorn disappointment when she'd gone. The priests, accustomed to groans and sobs from the cells' occupants, had paid him no mind. They'd left him in the embrace of the Lord and spared him no more than a fleeting, disinterested glance as they passed his cell, never knowing that he had found a sweeter embrace by far. The priest had come the next morning to purify his wounds with salt and wring proper penitence from his lips, and when he was released on the morning of the third day, he'd hobbled off on numb feet and found her in the sliver of shade in the training yard. She'd held out her canteen without a word and minded not a bit when he'd drained it nearly dry, and when he'd passed it back, her fingers had lingered on his. She'd smiled at him, conspiratorial and bright as quicksilver, and when he'd settled himself beside her on the dry earth, she'd closed the gap between them until their shoulders touched. So delicate and sweet that his eyes had closed of their own accord to savor it, and he'd turned his face to the sun in wordless gratitude.

When he was eighteen, all that he desired had been within his grasp. She had been in his arms, and she had been looking at him with such adoration and trust that his heart had stuttered inside his chest in jubilant recognition.

_She loves me,_ he'd realized with giddy wonderment, and he'd been ten feet tall and light as a feather. _She would be mine if I asked._

And how he'd wanted to. The words had trembled on the tip of his tongue, and he'd longed to whisper them into her ear and breathe them against her cheek, but he'd been stunned by the weight of her palm against his chest. It was so close, so much, more of her touch than he had ever hoped to know, and he'd been terrified of breaking the spell, of moving only to find that it was a dream. So he had simply held her, cradled her to him as though she were a rare and precious gift, and by the time he'd marshaled the courage to speak and offer her his heart and the shabby enticement of life at his side when the killing was done, the shadow of a wandering priest had fallen over the opposite wall and the chance had been lost in a flurry of hastily-disentangling limbs and straightening robes.

He hadn't dared seek her out again until the end of the night after the newly-ordained priests had been assigned to their respective orders and the Lord had seen fit to keep them together. It had seemed a sign to him, proof that God was more merciful than His servants upon Earth, with their flogs and their knouts and their waxy, unsmiling faces. If what he felt for her was a sin, surely He would have parted them forevermore, set them upon paths never meant to cross again. But He had preserved their unity, blessed him with the steadying presence of his sweetest sister. Perhaps the Fathers were mistaken; maybe the Almighty Father approved of the bond between them and wished them to nurture it with the assiduous care of faithful stewards ministering to a faded Eden. If so, he would be faithful in this calling, faithful unto the end of his days, and he would savor its blessings with a glad heart.

He'd approached her with his heart in his hands and been buoyed by the pleasure that had suffused her features at his approach. She'd been radiant with God's grace, resplendent and beautiful in her black robes. Even the slender crucifix that dangled from the end of her rosary had glowed with secret splendor, as though it had been cradled in the hands of the holy host before being entrusted to her. He'd wanted to sweep her into his arms and twirl her until they were giddy and dizzy and laughing helplessly, but the eyes of the Fathers and fellow priests were upon them, and so he had simply inclined his head and bowed over his folded hands.

_Congratulations, sister,_ he'd intoned with proper solemnity, but an impish smile had tugged at the corners of his mouth. _It will be an honor to serve Him at your side._

_Likewise, brother,_ she'd replied with aloof dignity, but desert roses had blossomed in her cheeks, and her eyes had sparkled with the same clandestine elation that had bubbled in his veins.

He could not resist, then. He'd had to gloat, to celebrate with she who lit the darkest, coldest corners of her heart, and so he had leaned forward and whispered two words in her ear. _My Liese. _Two words so inadequate to the hopeful, joyous song in his heart, but she had smiled all the same, so lovely that it had made his head swim. She'd understood, just as she always had, and he'd bowed and gone to mingle with the other priests before the Fathers closed the ordination ceremony and they returned to their various barracks in an unhurried procession of dour pomp and grim solemnity.

He'd spent the next seven years carefully nurturing their innocent courtship with small gestures of unspoken affection. Foregoing the last bite of his bread so that she might have that much more. Offering prayers for her safety and soul before each hunt and finding patches of loveliness in which they might meditate together, shoulder to shoulder with the sun on their faces. Briefly entangling their fingers as they passed in the corridors or marched over the burning sands. Taking her watches so that she might sleep. Plying her with these small favors as others might offer wine and roses. The love of children, some would say, but to him it had been as audacious as reaching for them sun, and on the horizon had been the tantalizing shimmer of something sweeter, the slow, lingering undulation of entwined bodies.

Then the call to Sola Mira had come, and he had been so close. Everyone had sensed that this was to be the last thrust of the smiting sword. Once the Queen was dead, her host would scatter and wither for want of guidance, and it would be a simple matter of sweeping up the dregs and pushing the few survivors onto reservations under pain of death. With no enemies to fight, they would be released from their obligations and free to build what lives they could among the grateful citizenry. They had tasted freedom on the dry air. Liese had been quietly ebullient, almost brazen in her affections as she patted his arm and dropped kisses onto his shoulder, and when he'd sat beside her and waited for the dawn, the moonlight had been the diaphanous white of bridal lace and he'd sworn he could smell roses on the gentle breeze. Hope. He'd been delirious with it, and he'd very nearly cupped her face in his blade-roughened hand and kissed her, drawn deeply of her until spots danced before his eyes and his bones felt too light inside his skin, but honor had demanded that he keep his vow of chastity until his freedom was duly won, and so he'd contented himself with brushing his reverent lips across her temple as her rosary beads dripped through her fingers like blood.

And then his brother had betrayed him, moved by cowardice and envious spite, and he'd languished in the bowels of the hive, feast for the eyeless, scabrous carrion crows that had pecked at him with needled mouths and reveled in his helpless agony. They'd howled with delight as he'd screamed and thrashed and pleaded for salvation from his god and from his brother and from Liese, and when he'd grown too weak to do anything but lie on the slab and blink blindly at the ceiling of the cavern, they'd lapped the tears from his face with eager, gelatinous tongues and dug their serrated claws into his weeping wounds. There had been time for regret there in the cold, forgotten dark, and as he'd felt the dim, guttering spark of their fangs sinking into him, he'd regretted that he had never kissed her that night, never declared his love against her nape and ground his ardor against her hip and enticed her to lie with him upon the sand, married in body and spirit if not in the eyes of the loveless, ascetic Church. If he had, he could have taken solace in their sacred union while his enemies slurped the life from his veins and shit it onto his twitching legs in cawing contempt. Instead, he'd been left with the skim of his lips across her temple and the distorted, wavering recollection of anonymous, rutting bodies seen through a whorehouse window. He'd retreated into himself in a last act of self-preservation, and as the last of his life had drained into the gullets of swarming, exultant vampires, he'd told himself that it was Liese who held him now. Liese, and the fluttering against his skin was merely the caress of the bedsheets as she loved him.

So yes, he had looked, and yes, he had coveted and indulged in libidinous fantasy. He's been waiting for this for years, sustaining himself on the vague, faraway promise of smiles and skimming fingers and the warmth of a robed shoulder against his as he sat on scree and flint or stood watch on some comfortless hill for the protection of worthless, bovine fools who had never spared him a moment's compassion. He wants the happiness he had glimpsed in her face and felt in her touch. He wants the pleasure of connection and the ecstasy of union. He wants love and security and the wet heat of a cunt around his cock. He wants life in its fullest measure. He sees no reason to deny himself what she would have so willingly offered him long ago were it not for the vows wrung from their childhood mouths, when they had not understood what they were surrendering.

But look was all he had done. He could have taken her then, could have pinned her arms and torn her clothes away and buried himself within her while she bowed and whimpered. He had been stronger than her even before the Queen had gifted him her power; now she would be as a child in his grasp, easily subdued and easily broken. But he hadn't. Because she is sacred, and because he would have her surrender herself to him willingly, a bride bestowing a gift upon her groom in the privacy of the marriage bed, not a piece of dead-eyed chattel thrusting mechanically against his pistoning prick because she has no other choice. He would finish the song whose first notes had sounded in his heart when they'd stood forehead to forehead in the corner of the ordination hall. The Church has wrested so much from him and sullied the rest. They will not poison this.

He stalks into his bedroom and opens the wardrobe that stands to the left of the brass bed that dominates the room. Once, it had housed rough-spun flannels and chambray shirts and square-toed brogans stained with sand and handmade dresses meant to drape the sparse frame of a rancher's wife. Now it holds black, silk shirts and three pairs of black denim. There are empty hangers for his duster and the shirt and pants he now wears, and the bottom boasts space for his boots and a few pairs besides. And on the furthest wire hanger, incongruous and frumpy amid the austere elegance of his wardrobe, is a single flannel nightdress. It had belonged to the woman of the house once and should have been thrown away with the rest of the junk he'd purged from the cabin when he'd taken residence, but the familiar charged with the task had missed it. Lazy bastard. Still, it's an unforeseen stroke of fortune.

He plucks it from the hanger and holds it up for inspection. It's coarse and pilled and faded and too short, and unworthy of the flesh against which it will rest, but it is also his only option until he can send a scout for supplies.

_Love me, Liese, and I promise you'll have linens and silks._

He drapes the rag over his arm and returns to her bedroom to rap upon the door. "It's me," he calls. "I found a nightgown. Shall I leave it?"

A rustling from inside, and then the door cracks open to reveal Liese draped in a bedsheet. His eyes are drawn to her milky shoulders and chest and the alluring dip of her cleavage, and his pulse races. Sweating, writhing bodies flash across his mind. He shifts and sidles and swallows with a dry click. _That which is freely given tastes the sweeter,_ he reminds himself, and averts his gaze to the safer territory of the wall beside the door.

Soft fingers pluck the gown from his arm, and the door shuts in his face with a muted click. He shakes his head as though to clear it and takes a deep breath to steady his nerves, and he's about to turn for the kitchen when the door opens a second time and Liese emerges, clad in the ugly housedress. The hem scarcely reaches her shins, and she plucks irritably at the prickly fabric.

"Was the previous owner a gnome?" she grouses, and tugs ineffectually at the uneven hem.

"Just another stunted specimen of humanity." _And she tasted like copper and rust when I tore out her throat._

"She was a big fan of lavender, too," she mutters, and wrinkles her nose in distaste.

He snorts in amusement. "Come on. You need to eat." He offers her his hand, and when she accepts, he leads her down the hall and into the small kitchen, where the familiar is busily preparing breakfast.

She stiffens at the sight of it. "It's doing the cooking?" she says dubiously, and her hand drops instinctively in search of a scythe left in the desert.

"It is," he agrees, and guides her to a chair at the square, wooden table beside the window. "And it's best you let it, unless you want burnt eggs and raw sausage. The only thing I was ever good at was toast. Maybe."

"How do I know it won't poison it?" she demands suspiciously, and her fingers curl around the hilt of an imaginary scythe.

"It won't," he answers serenely. "I eat what it cooks. If it does, it will be the last thing it ever does." The familiar, head bent to the sizzling, spitting sausages, quails, and its flabby, bloodless hand rises to finger its swollen throat.

"That won't be much consolation to me if I'm dead on the floor," she notes prosaically.

"Nothing in this house will do you harm." He sits down opposite her and slides his hand across the table to cover hers.

She eyes the familiar in dubious silence for a long moment, and then she turns to gaze out the window. The sun has nearly set, and the sky beyond the thin panes is a panorama of scarlet and gold and deepening violet. "Is this your usual timetable, then?" she asks quietly. "To sleep with the sun and rise at dusk?"

"More often than not, but I can sleep whenever I choose. You say that like it's such a bad thing. It's not. It's beautiful." He gestures to the tranquil landscape outside, to the sleepy rose of the heavens and the lengthening shadows of sagebrush that stretch spidery fingers across the patch of sand that serves as a yard.

"I suppose," she agrees. "It's just...different."

"There's no sin in difference, sister, no matter what the Church tells you. God loved diversity. Look at the world he created, at the paradise he gifted man before they destroyed it. The night was never meant to be unholy. It's men who made it that way, who, ashamed of what the Church told them was their sins, hid them in the dark. The night is innocent. It merely bears the sins of those who walk in it."

"'Of what the Church told them was their sins'" she repeats incredulously. "You deny the existence of sin?"

He shrugs. "Who's to decide what constitutes a sin? The Church tells us that sex is a sin, and yet the Lord himself commanded us to go forth and multiply. If sex were such an anathema to him, why would He command us to indulge in it? The Church says we should not covet, and yet they covet each soul that draws breath upon this earth with terrifying greed. Those who refuse to surrender it on bended knee are deemed unworthy, yet doesn't the Church command us to love even the lowest? It rails and thunders against gluttony, yet the Fathers grow fat from the comforts of their table while you starve. How many nights did we go hungry in their service, surviving on stale bread and gamey jerky while our enemies gorged on our blood? How often did we sleep on hardpan and shiver beneath rags while they slept in warm beds and called themselves God's warriors?"

"More times than I can count," she admits "Though I suffered less than I should have, thanks to you." She squeezes his hand

He sighs with the pleasure of it. "And what of love, sister?" He raises her hand and kisses the small, perpetually-bruised knuckles. "'And the greatest of these is love'. There it is, writ large in the Good Book itself and cast at us like an obligation whenever they needed us to die for their cause, but they were only too happy to punish us for it when it didn't suit their whims. I shared my water and my bread with you because I loved you, but if they had known that, they would have flayed the flesh from my bones and left me to hang in their cells until I was a mummified corpse. Their mouths preach love, sister, but their hands know nothing of it. There was nothing impure in it when I touched your hand or rested my head on your shoulder after a long march, but they would have had my blood for it. And yours. They're so afraid of the thing their god holds most dear that they forbid us to express it, to even dream of it. Tell me, when they told you I was dead, did they offer you comfort?"

She considers a moment. "No. They couldn't. You know the protocol. One does not weep for those martyred in Christ."

A contemptuous snort. "There was nothing glorious in my death. It was a cold, solitary agony that took days. Before I was remade, I died with vampire shit on my legs. I don't think that's the glory the Church intended."

A hastily-muffled squawk escapes her, and she leans forward to rest her forehead on the table. He watches her shoulders heave with suppressed emotion. He lets go of her hand to stroke the golden fall of her hair. It's free from its customary plait, and he relishes the softness of it beneath his fingers. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he murmurs, and it's true, though he cannot deny an ugly pang of satisfaction at her display. Priest hadn't so much as blinked when he'd accused him of letting him go, and the indifference had stung more than he cares to admit. He changes the subject. "Did you weep for me?"

"Of course I did," she retorts to her knees, and the pique in it amuses him. "It would have been a sin not to. You were my-" Her bony body shudders. "-were my brother. Chin tried to make it better, tried to stay with me and jostle my shoulder like you used to, but-"

"It wasn't the same," he finishes for her, and she nods, forehead rubbing the table like fine sandpaper. Her revelation surprises him, and he thinks of Chin the last time he saw him, blanched and dead and hanging from a makeshift cross in the dust-blown remains of Jericho with a hole in his chest where his heart had been. It had, he remembers now as he pets Liese's hair, tasted of wine and pomegranates and sustained him for days on his trek across the desert. The memory sits uneasily in his belly, sour as tainted blood, and he's glad when Liese speaks again.

"I made it back to the barracks before-" Her chest hitches. "There was an acolyte stripping your cot, and it looked so stark without the sheets, and I realized you were never going to sleep in it again, and I just-" An indrawn breath. "I made it to the laundry room before I just...couldn't. Priest saw me coming out, but he pretended he didn't."

"How magnanimous of him," he says drily.

She sits up. Her eyes are red, but her cheeks are dry. "Pity would have punished us both," she reminds him.

"I don't suppose they gave you any of my things? My spare rosary, my Bible?"

She shakes her head. "The acolyte bundled everything up and carried it off. I never knew what they did with it." She shifts against the memory and wipes the corner of her eye, gaze fixed on the steadily-encroaching shadow of a sagebrush.

_They blotted me from all memory. Just collected my sad handful of belongings like so much trash and made it disappear. On a cloud of ash, most likely. And then they forbad you to speak my name._

"And yet you still serve them."

She opens her mouth to reply, but is interrupted by the familiar, who scuttles over to place heaping plates of eggs and sausage on the table between them. Before Liese, it sets an egg in a hole.

"Eggy in a basket," it simpers, and offers her an obsequious, black-toothed grin. She eyes it in disgusted silence, and her hand inches toward the cutlery on the side of the plate.

"It likes to experiment," he says as it sidles anxiously beside the table.

"That's...reassuring."

"I thought a bit of whimsy would please the lady," it says eagerly, and rubs its hands together with a papery rasp.

"It would please me if you'd stop looming and see to your chores. You disturb my appetite," he growls.

It flinches as from a blow. "Yes, master, yes, yes," it mutters. It spares Liese a last lingering look and retreats to the relative safety of the stove.

He picks up his fork and spears a plump sausage. "What?" he demands, link dripping grease onto his plate as his fork hovers over the plain ceramic.

"You eat?" she says in surprise.

"Man cannot live by blood alone," he says, and drops the sausage onto his plate. "Besides, I like the taste." He spears another link. "Eat," he commands. "You're too thin, sister. I'd wager you've been living on bread and jerky for days."

She picks up her fork and selects a link of her own. "Just bread. We can't afford the meat for the jerky anymore, and when we can, the meat's already gone over." She takes a bite of sausage and sighs with pleasure as the spicy meat releases its savor.

"The Church still cares for its children, I see."

"The official word is that they've less need of us now that the vampire threat is past."

His face betrays nothing, but it takes an effort of will not to caper with glee. Even after the failed assault on the cities, the fools have learned nothing. No doubt they've told themselves that it was an aberration, the work of a mad rogue. Good. Let them think themselves untouchable. It will give the Queen time to replenish her host.

"Unofficially, there's word going around that the Church isn't paying its bills. The last few times I've gone into the city for supplies, vendors have complained of not getting paid. They might be too afraid to cut us off entirely, but they'll gladly give us the bottom of the barrel." The first sausage link has disappeared, and she reaches for the second. "Weevil-infested flour, stringy beef, rotten vegetables. Almost no sugar or coffee."

He groans in sympathy at that last. The familiar reappears with a pot of coffee, and it fills their cups with another idiot grin.

"And yet they still expect you to hunt and protect the citizenry of their fair city," he says as the familiar sets sugar, cream, and honey on the table.

She shrugs and eyes the array of condiments with ill-disguised longing. "There aren't that many hunts anymore. Just the occasional escapee from Shawshank. As for the citizenry, they're content to ignore us."

"My table is yours, Liese," he says, and nudges the sugar towards her. "As for the people, I wish I could say I was surprised." He clucks and shakes his head in feigned disappointment. "One would think they would be more grateful, especially after last year."

Her gaze sharpens at that, but she accepts the bowl of sugar and dumps three heaping tablespoons into her steaming mug. "They were, for a while," she says as she stirs her coffee. "Priest nearly started a panic when he showed up at the cathedral with a severed vampire head and dropped it at Monsignor Orelas' feet during Mass."

"Did he really?" he says, so delighted by the image that he momentarily forgets his hatred for his brother. "I'm sure Orelas enjoyed that."

She chuckles. "He was apoplectic. Started ranting and raving, accusing Priest of heresy and charlatanism. Threatened to excommunicate him from the Church. He tried, too, but he was overruled by the rest of the High Council. A trainload of smoldering carcasses carries more weight that raging, blind indignation, I suppose." She pauses to take a sip of coffee, and he can't suppress a smile when her eyelids flutter with appreciation.

"And Orelas tolerated such brazen insubordination?" The Monsignor had always been a hard man, cold and gaunt and unstinting as stone. Rumor had it that it was he who had advocated for the harsh punishments meted out to wayward priests and citizens, and it was hard fact that the prisons had swelled since he had assumed his seat at the head of the Council. He had served under Orelas from the time of his assumption into the Church to the time it had abandoned him in the tomb of Sola Mira, but he had met him only once, on the night of his ordination. It was he who had delivered the convocation and presided over the Mass, and it was he who had etched the tattoo into his forehead. There had been no flicker of mercy in the eyes that had looked down at him as the needles pierced his flesh and the blood flowed upon the altar, just a dispassionate, inscrutable blankness that had made his skin crawl.

"Not much else he could do," she says, and pierces the egg with the tines of her fork. "Not after he was ousted as head of the Council."

He nearly chokes on his coffee. "Ousted?" he repeats incredulously.

She nods and reaches for a piece of toast with which to sop the yolk. "He put up one hell of a fight, but Chamberlain had both reason and public sentiment on his side, and the Council sided with him."

"And Orelas? Don't tell me he went quietly."

She snorts. "No. He couldn't be ousted completely, so now he sits in his seat and plots and festers. Most of the Council takes Chamberlain's part, but Orelas still holds sway with a few, and they obstruct whenever they can."

"Which might explain the funding problem."

Another snort around a mouthful of egg. "Might? Orelas will bring the Church down before he'll let it rest in someone else's hands. There are rumors of a schism brewing in the Council."

A schism within the Church presents so many possibilities, so many opportunities for exploitation. A Church fighting amongst itself is more easily broken. The Queen would be pleased.

_Oh, sister, you have no idea of the gift you bring me,_ he thinks giddily, and hides an exultant grin behind his coffee cup.

"Naturally, we're caught in the crossfire," she continues, oblivious to the thoughts whirling in his head. "The one good to come out of it is that Chamberlain believes Priest about the vampire threat. He's tried to increase funding and find new acolytes, but Orelas..."

"Is obstructing."

She jabs the egg-slick tines of her fork at him. "Mmm."

"Did Chambderlain order this hunt?"

She lowers her fork, chewing slowly. "Priest says he did."

"That doesn't sound like unbridled confidence."

She sighs and etches a pattern into the puddle of yolk on her plate. "I'm not sure what to think anymore. He's always been zealous-" He snorts at the polite understatement. "-but ever since the failed attack on the cities, he's been half-mad, obsessed with reports of a yellow-eyed walker in the desert. Khara believed him, but most of us didn't. Mariel flatly refused his orders to select acolytes for the hunt and threatened to lodge a grievance with the Council if he insisted on a hunt." She puts down her fork. "I wish she had."

"Did you believe him?"

"About a yellow-eyed vampire? No. I thought maybe it was just another bandit. One with some new kind of radiation poisoning."

"Then why did you go?"

"Because obedience is all I have left. Everything else died...a long time ago." Her throat bobs, and she retreats to the safety of the shadow cast by the sagebrush. "If I had known, I would never have brought them here. I thought we'd just chase ghosts long enough to soothe his mania and go home. They were children, Johannes, mere tools, just as we were. Did you have to kill them?"

"You brought them there to kill me, if you'll recall."

"They were no match for you. You didn't have to kill them," she counters.

"Should I have stood there and let them kill me to spare your conscience?" he retorts, and she recoils as though he's struck her. "If I had let them live, they would only have returned, older and more experienced. I have no intention of being the fox to the Church's hounds. I will kill them all if I have to."

"You didn't kill me," she points out. "I'm a greater threat to you than untrained children."

"You are a different matter," he says shortly.

"Why?"

"Because you are-_" My Liese, _he finishes inside his head. "because you are."

"He says you killed Chin in Jericho."

"That's one lie he hasn't told."

"Brother, why? He was your brother. We all were. We grew up together, fought together."

"And yet none of you came for me!" he shouts, and the familiar cowers at his display of fury. "Not even you," he says quietly.

For a moment, she's frozen, eyes wide and lips parted in startlement. Then she takes a deep breath, then another, and rises from the table on wooden legs. Her chest heaves. "This is my hell," she moans. "This is my hell, and I deserve it." Then she's lurching from the kitchen, keening as she goes, hand pressed to her side.

He's so bewildered that he can only stare at her empty chair in confusion until the familiar takes a shuffling step after her. Then he's up and in pursuit. He finds her in the living room, clutching the doorknob in both hands and sagging heavily against the door.

"This is as far as I got," she says, and sinks to her knees, still clutching the door. "After you died, I got up in the middle of the night to come for you, but I couldn't make myself open the door. "I just...stood there. Like this. My legs wouldn't move. Wouldn't. Priest said they'd torn you to pieces, and I didn't want to see what they'd done to you, what had become of my-" She gasps and keens and sways drunkenly against the door. "-m-my brother. I was a coward. I did not come. I deserve to burn."

Her mouth opens in a soundless cry of anguish. She hangs from the doorknob for a moment, and then she sits down hard upon the floor and buries her fingers in her hair. She rocks back and forth. "I deserve to burn. I deserve to burn," she chants, thin and strangled, as though she can't coax air into her chest, which heaves and shudders convulsively.

He crosses the living room in two strides and drops to his knees beside her. "Hush, hush, Liese," he murmurs, and gathers her to him. She clutches him with panicky tightness, and her heart is a frantic timpani inside her chest. "I'm sorry, sister. Forgive me."

"I cannot be forgiven. I deserve to burn," she cries, and her eyes are wild inside her face.

He cradles her against his chest, alarmed at her hysteria. Her body thrums with the effort of containing the guilt and grief raging inside her, and as she struggles to breathe, he's terrified that it will prove too much, that her heart will simply burst inside her chest. "No, you don't," he whispers into her hair and she trembles in his embrace.

"Yes, I do. It was my fault."

"No, it wasn't," he says firmly. "It was his. He should never have let go."

"You don't understand!" It's almost a wail. "You died because of me. He took you from me because I wanted...because I loved..."

Comprehension dawns. _Oh, sister..._

"No, sister. No, no, no. Those are lies of the Church. Love is not a sin. Never. I died because he was weak."

"But if I had come back..."

"Then you would have died. There were too many of them. If eight priests couldn't defeat them, what makes you think you could?"

"But-

"No. Let it go, Liese." He caresses her cheek. "Let it go."

"But the Church says-"

He gently grips her chin and raises her face to his. "There is no Church here. You're safe."

Her face crumples. "They wouldn't let me," she cries, and then the dam breaks. Her back bows with the force of the howl she releases. It's the howl of an animal tortured long past its endurance, mindless and unending. It frightens him with its intensity as she struggles to get closer, fingers clawing at the shoulders of his jacket. She's crying so hard that she's can't breathe, and her breath comes in great, whooping gasps as snot drips from her nostrils.

"'M sorry, brother," she sobs as her fingers scrabble in the leather. "'M so sorry."

"Ssssshhh, shhhh. I know. It's all right, Liese."

She sobs until she chokes and retches, and utters garbled apologies that harrow his heart. She gabbles of love and thwarted desire and hubris. And she wails. On and on. He can only hold her and hum tunelessly while the scalding tide spills from her and washes over them both in a smothering wave. The noise draws the familiar, who hovers uncertainly on the threshold between the living room and kitchen.

"Get out," he hisses as its muddy gaze falls on Liese's crumpled, shivering form. It has no right to see her like this, broken and helpless. No one does.

It's a long time before her cries taper into watery moans and pitiful whimpers, and as he rocks with her and soothes her into leaden bonelessness with his hands and presses kisses to her crown, the fear for her is replaced by a cold fury. They have tortured her, stained her with guilt meant for their hands, and denied her the feeble comfort of tears. They have convinced her that love is poison, crucified her for the sins of hope and love and compassion and then demanded that she serve them to her last breath.

"And I will give succor to your wounds and make you whole again," he murmurs as she sighs and snuffles in his sheltering embrace.

To the Church, he will show no such mercy. Not for the vampires, who see him as but a useful means to an end, but for her, and when the last of their spires have collapsed in pillars of ash and smoke and hypocrisy exposed, he will take her home. Not to the barracks, with its narrow beds and damp, grey walls, but to the river where the grasses grow lush and the mud is cool between your toes. He will set out lines for the fish and brush wedding rice from her hair, and in the fall when the leaves turn to fire, he'll watch her belly swell with promise.

"There is no Church here," he whispers, and hums a half-remembered lullaby from his life by the river, where the grass grows lush.


End file.
